This news is a few weeks old, but the HBOMax sci-fi series Raised by Wolves was canceled after two seasons.
This was sad but not altogether unpredictable. I wrote about the second season as being too weird and confusing to be sustainable.
The show’s mythology was fascinating but the show seemed determined to dole it out only in incremental little bits. It was really hard to root for characters when you didn’t know what they wanted, or sometimes who they even were.
I never watched Lost, but I understand this was one of the problems with it.
It’s definitely the problem with Westworld, which seems to be fetishizing confusion as a organizing principle.
Who knows why some shows survive and others don’t? Maybe Westworld has too many talent relationships to shoot down?
Or, as was pointed out in the articles mourning Raised by Wolves, there could be corporate stuff going on with the Warner Bros.–Discovery merger behind the programming decisions (corporate stuff even moreso than usual, I mean).
I feel bad for the cast and creators of Raised by Wolves, who were trying something new, ambitious and different—and made a beautifully produced show.
I also feel bad for the audience—which includes me! I guess we’ll never know the truth behind that wacky planet?
This reminds me that my favorite show of the last ten years that met a premature end (also after two seasons) was Counterpart, about a gateway to a parallel world. This was such a super-smart show, treating parallel earths like a John Le Carré Cold War espionage thriller.
But it was so smart, that I suspected it was leaving most of the audience cold emotionally. And sure enough, it was canceled by STARZ. But wow, did I love that show!
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