There’s so much TV saturating television right now that sometimes good shows get lost in the shuffle. Such is the case with Proof, the supernatural-ish drama that premiered on TNT this summer. Today, the cable channel announced it will not be moving forward with a second season of the series. With one swift move, Proof is dead, and it probably won’t find a second life somewhere else.
While TNT has a lot of big, bold summer dramas, including The Last Ship, on paper Proof had a lot going for it. It was executive produced by Kyra Sedgwick, who headlined The Closer on TNT for seven lengthy seasons, until the show ultimately ended in 2012. Proof also starred The L Word and Lie To Me's Jennifer Beals, who was a great fit to play a doctor looking into possible supernatural occurrences in the hopes of proving there is life after death. But despite the nice pedigree, Proof isn’t getting a second season. In fact, it may have been doomed from the start.
TNT has been making a large push to cancel some of its procedural-based shows and move toward edgier fare. In the past year, Perception and fan-favorite Franklin and Bash were canceled, the former despite decent ratings. Deadline says Proof’s cancellation may just be another example of a show from TNT’s old regime getting the boot. Since new President Kevin Reilly took over, he has pushed for hipper shows like Public Morals to take precedence over the networks older-skewing programs.
Interestingly, while Proof’s numbers were never great—the show only hovered around 2 million total viewers an episode, that is better than the numbers the aforementioned newbie program Public Morals is doing each week. Still, when you look at the advertising demographic for Proof, that is to say all the people who watched the show between the ages of 18 and 49, the numbers dwindle, a lot. One week, only 547,000 viewers showed up in Live+ 3 ratings in the 18-49 demographic, which is patently not good. So while there were clearly pros to Proof, there were also cons.
There’s been a lot of upheaval in TNT’s schedule over the last few years. While stuff like Rizzoli & Isles, the recently-ended Falling Skies and the recently renewed The Last Ship has managed to do well for the network, a lot of programming has been cancelled by the cabler after just one or two seasons. (In fact, we bet you already forgot Monday Mornings.) Obviously, TNT is looking to go in a new direction, and while there are plenty of hiccups related to the changes the network is making right now, hopefully the network will stabilize in the long run. If not, it's a shark eat shark world out there.
Here's what TNT has coming up.
