Over the weekend, AMC brought back on of its wildest scripted shows, Preacher, which is based on the comic book series of the same name. But not all is well for every comic-related show on the network, as Kevin Smith revealed on social media that his relatively long-running unscripted series Comic Book Men has been cancelled after seven seasons, with Season 8 no longer in the pipeline.
In true Kevin Smith style, he revealed Comic Book Men's cancellation not merely through a tweet or a video, but through an entire podcast episode. As pointed out in his post, Smith joined up with longtime collaborators Walt Flanagan, Bryan Johnson, Mike Zapcic and Ming Chen to record a two-hour-plus episode of SModcast that served as a "sad but celebratory" episode obviously focused on saying goodbye to Comic Book Men and reliving some of their favorite moments from the seven-season production.
Kevin Smith revealed that AMC contacted him personally to let him know that the execs weren't going to go ahead with a Season 8 renewal. No big and clear-cut reasons were given for the decision, but several factors come into play here. For one, Comic Book Men has never been much of a ratings juggernaut, which is fairly expected for the kind of show that it is, which is basically Smith's crew lovingly embracing different slices of pop culture in often silly ways. The viewership rarely surpassed a million people in the later seasons, and the key 18-49 demo rating was usually around a 0.2. Not the best numbers, though they were obviously solid enough to keep AMC's continued investment.
As well, Comic Book Men was already something of an outlier on AMC as an unscripted series. Years ago, viewers might remember when the network decided to scale back on nearly all of its reality-based shows, with an impassioned focus on broadening its scripted fare. Comic Book Men was the only survivor other than Chris Hardwick's Talking Dead, which recently also met its untimely end after Hardwick was accused of sexual assault and more by ex-girlfriend Chloe Dykstra. And considering AMC hasn't returned to that kind of programming, Comic Book Men wasn't expected to last forever. Not that fans will be easily consoled by such an observation.
Comic Book Men wrapped up its seventh season back in April, so there are no more new episodes to look forward to. But you can catch episodes on AMC's website if you have a cable or satellite subscription. While waiting to see what AMC fills the time slot with, head to our summer premiere schedule.
