Tis the season to be jolly, but it’s hard to keep up positive appearances when your TV show has just been canceled. Big changes are coming to TNT in the future, and it’s a future that will be missing the dramas Legends, Public Morals and Agent X. Weren’t you guys just saying that tonight was a great night to go through your DVR schedule and delete stuff?
Let’s go through them one by one. Still in the midst of Season 2, Legends stars Sean Bean as Martin Odum, an FBI agent who goes undercover for his problematic cases by pretending to be a different person. The show was completely retooled for Season 2, but the applauded effort didn’t help to bring in any more viewers, as the last six episodes equal around half of the audience that tuned in for the majority of Season 1. Sucks to know we won’t see Bean in action in this capacity anymore, but this is the rare occurrence of one of the actor’s projects dying before his character does.
Capping off its first and only season in October, Public Morals was something of an experiment on TNT’s part. Not only was it a project that creator and star Edward Burns had been putting together for almost 20 years, but the network decided to use the 1960s-set police drama as its first (and perhaps only) foray into the world of binge-watching, with all of the episodes going up for streaming early in the season. Unfortunately, neither those things nor decent critical reviews helped the show’s ratings much, and the 2.1 million-strong audience for the premiere dwindled to around 500,000 for the finale. As Deadline points out, it’s hard to gauge just how many viewers each episode got, as the streaming and on demand numbers weren’t added into the Nielsen ratings.
Initially championed as a return-to-limelight project for Sharon Stone, Agent X actually earned the best average ratings of these three shows, although its lone season won’t be finished until the end of the month. Agent X, which centers on Stone’s Vice President Maccabee instructing the titular special agent (played by Jeff Hephner) to take on cases that other U.S. government bodies cannot, was not as lucky as far as critical acclaim fared, as Agent X has earned its fair share of panning across the Internet.
These series join a TNT graveyard that also added goodbye to Proof, Falling Skies and Perception earlier this year. The new brass is looking to bring edgier fare to the network, so expect to see some wilder shows taking this trio’s place in the future.
