Earlier in the year, Prime Video announced that its sci-fi series The Peripheral would return for a second season. With a first season that was said to be fairly enjoyable and starring the likes of Chloe Grace-Moretz and Jack Reynor, it sucks that the biggest bit of news about season two is also its very last, as Prime Video has reversed its decision and killed the show after one season.
Announced by Deadline on Friday, Prime Video elected to cancel the show due to the still-ongoing strikes involving the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Though production wasn’t reportedly set to start until 2024, studios not agreeing to the desired terms of both unions has ground nearly all big Hollywood productions to a halt. Apparently, Amazon already has its 2025 media pipeline planned out, so Peripheral and last year’s sports comedy-drama A League of Our Own both had to get cut since they were each only a season long already. And as a sci-fi show, The Peripheral’s production delays would’ve led to more costs into the show’s budget.
This isn’t the first time streamers or networks have elected to cancel kill the additional season it had previously offered a show. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Netflix killed Glow’s fourth season, and ABC did the same with the one-season series Stumptown. Last year, AMC canceled the animated show Pantheon when it only completed half of its original two-season order, and as the WB Discovery merger was still working itself out, the company decided it just wouldn’t air the fourth and final season of Snowpiercer that had already wrapped production and had been marketed.
Shows getting cancelled is never easy, but there’s something particularly insidious about doing it as those involved in making it are demanding better wages and working conditions in the aims of making those shows better. This definitely won’t be the last pair of shows who get cancelled as the strikes persist, but all those cancellations will do is illuminate how much studios are willing to needlessly hack off a limb instead of doing the sensible thing and giving the actors and writers what they want.
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