In case you missed it on Friday night of the holiday weekend, Amazon canceledUtopiaafter a single season during which it laid out a rich mythology that is now all for naught.
What started as the show thatDavid Fincherwalked away from at HBO ends with Amazon walking away and leaving creatorGillian Flynnstuck holding the bag. I honestly didn’t see this one coming, and yet, I’m not surprised, as nothing surprises me anymore thanks to the pandemic… which can probably be blamed for this particular show’s cancellation, though not for the typical reasons.
See, Amazon didn’t release a statement explaining its oddly-timed decision, which only invites speculation. I’d speculate thatUtopiawas a fairly expensive show for the streamer, but what’s totally fair to say is that it failed to register with critics or audiences on the whole. I enjoyed the series, but it’s only 51 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and there just wasn’t a ton of conversation out there around the show. Streaming success is based on buzz, and when the media decides a show isn’t worth its time – notably, Collider did not reviewUtopia– it’s hard to get people organically excited. As always, it’s the audience that ultimately decides whether a show breaks through on a cultural level the way thatTiger KingorThe Queen’s Gambitdid this year, andUtopiajust never seemed to make a dent with the public. Now, why was that?
For starters, timing is everything in Hollywood, andUtopiacould not have come at a worse time. Yes, it was an eerily timely series about a pandemic, but television is supposed to be a distraction from the real world more than a reflection, and people could basically look out their window and get the paranoid gist ofUtopia, which upped the ante, naturally, in terms of violence.
But this was a show in which children were routinely killed and the characters (rightly) questioned a vaccine, which is not something America or the rest of the world really needs right now. So while I was personally looking forward to a second season ofUtopiaand delving deeper into the mystery behind its titular comic book, I completely understand why the show just wasn’t worth the potential headache for Amazon. It just never had the breakout success envisioned by the streamer, and at that point, given the themes of the material and the current state of the world, the cost just isn’t worth it. Better to invest that money in either a fresh idea or another IP that could catch on with the culture rather than serve up seconds of a meal that no one was all that interested in the first time around.
I’ll miss this cast, which includedJohn Cusack,Rainn Wilson,Sasha Lane,Desmin Borges,Dan Byrd,Ashleigh LaThrop,Farrah Mackenzie,Christopher DenhamandEuphoria’sJavon Walton, but at the same time, I’m glad they’re now free to do other things, because I don’t think a second season would have necessarily improved upon the first without jumping the shark a laLost.
As for Amazon, I wish it hadn’t allowed the potential audience forUtopiato busy itself watchingThe Boys, which also held the focus and attention of the streamer’s marketing department, making theUtopialaunch something of an afterthought. Why wasHuntersrenewed and not Utopia? Well, its reviews were a bit better, and it had more of a ‘fun’ hook. Why didThe Expanseget a sixth season? That I can’t tell you. I have no explanation, but obviously it comes down to Amazon’s formula regarding cost versus eyeballs. We may never get viewing metrics from Amazon or any of the streamers, who are under no obligation to provide them, but it sure would be helpful in understanding some of their decisions, both as a critic and a consumer who pays multiple streaming bills each month.
In the meantime, I’ll pour one out forUtopia, and continue to look forward to Amazon’sUnderground Railroadseries fromBarry Jenkins, as well as its series adaptation ofA League of Their Own.Click hereto read more about the latter project, andclick hereto watch the latest teaser forThe Underground Railroad.
