If you look at the list of all the canceled TV shows in 2024, you might notice an awful lot of entries that belonged at CBS. It was a bloodbath over at the Eye Network earlier this year, and while CBS Studios head honcho David Stapf was apologetic, it was clear there was nothing to be done. Lots of big shows were going the way of the dinosaur and that included NCIS: Hawai’i, So Help Me Todd, and CSI: Vegas, among others.
At the time the news broke, I was really focused in on things like the cast’s response to the NCIS: Hawai’i cancelation and the fact the fans were trying to rally to save So Help Me Todd, but now months later I’ve realized the parent studio did allegedly try to keep some of these shows on the air. Buried in an interview with Deadline, David Stapf said it actually wasn’t CBS Studios’ decision to say goodbye, but rather, the network's. More importantly, however, the report said efforts were made to shift the shows to "new homes," but those efforts were "unsuccessful."
At the time the shows were canceled, there was some question regarding whether or not new episodes of the CBS Studios productions might shift over and be available to those with a Paramount Plus subscription. There is some precedent for this happening with shows like SEAL Team, which has had a successful run after transitioning. There’s also been precedent for network shows to go to other streaming services in the past, as evidenced by Netflix picking up Lucifer a few years back.
Unfortunately, So Help Me Todd star Marcia Gay Harden also clarified that the sale of Paramount may have led to additional complications for some of these former CBS shows to be rehoused. And Stapf in the same interview talked about streaming services hitting uncertain waters ahead and pulling back on the amount of content that is being greenlighted, noting:
I think it’s always been hard; it’s probably a little bit harder now. There’s a lot of people selling and there’s a lot of platforms that are undergoing the same sort of contraction that everybody else is. So it’s harder but it’s not impossible [to sell content].
While he was speaking about new projects, it’s still a germane point to tie into pickups for canceled projects. The end result? Ultimately all three of the popular axed shows from the 2024 TV schedule did not get a pickup elsewhere.
I guess it’s a little bit of a consolation to know CBS Studios tried to keep the shows alive elsewhere, but it’s also a bummer to learn their just wasn’t enough interest, or at least not enough interest to justify cost. Filming NCIS: Hawai’i in Hawai’i wasn’t exactly cheap, and there were rumors the budget for Hawai’i was going to get slashed before the show ultimately got axed instead.
The good news is CBS has a lot of exciting new content coming in the fall, but it's rare that so much content with this much interest is still being talked about months and months later, and I'm interested to see if the choices the network made were solid ones.
