Amazon Just Canceled A Star-Studded Sci-fi Series After One Season
Amazon just canceled a sci-fi series that had some series star power in it. It's a crushing blow for fans who were getting into this show
These days, with the streaming wars going at full tilt and every platform looking for an edge in terms of their content and their budgets, it often doesn’t take much for a series to get the proverbial ax. If a show isn’t landing an audience early and often, that usually means it won’t be long for this world. And it doesn’t matter if the show is “good” either. If the internal metrics aren’t there then neither will be the series. Such is the case for Amazon’s Night Sky which was just canceled after one season.
According to Deadline, Amazon is letting Night Sky go after its first season and the reasons aren’t all that hard to figure out. The show just didn’t perform all that well on its Amazon Video platform, failing to garner much in the way of an audience from the jump. And because the series had a science-fiction leaning to it, the production costs were more than a typical series in this respect. Combine those two things together and it’s easy to see why Night Sky, even with strong critical marks for its first (and only) season wouldn’t be able to last on the streaming platform.
The concept of the series was a cool one and the show started off in a mysterious, though intriguing fashion. J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek play Franklin and Irene York, an older married couple who seem to be living a quiet and normal life in their rural setting. But they are hiding a pretty cool secret that has a chance to wildly swing their property values. It seems that hidden in the bottom of their garage is a portal that takes them to a deserted planet somewhere else in the galaxy. They’ve known about (and used) this portal for years in relative peace and quiet. Eventually, the couple runs into a cult that is involved here and things do turn a bit hairy.
Night Sky was met with mostly positive reviews and is sitting at 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics praised the performances from J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek in particular though did mostly agree that the story, in and of itself, was plenty intriguing for a full series. If there was a larger complaint it was that the stories around the general rural and quaint aspects of the couple’s lives didn’t always perfectly mix with some of the higher concept sci-fi pieces that were coming through as well. This could have led to a disconnect when it came to the viewership who possibly felt they had feet in both worlds without being interested in either.
Regardless, the reasoning behind the cancellation of Night Sky is moot now seeing as how the decision has been made and it won’t continue on for a second season. Again, it doesn’t always pay to get attached to new shows on streaming because it doesn’t take much for them to get scrapped if they aren’t performing up to snuff. That was certainly the case with Amazon and Night Sky.
