Coming as a complete surprise, CBS announced yesterday that its freshman Summer series Salvation will be returning for a second season of thirteen episodes. That show started out in July with decent enough ratings for a Summer entry, but saw those drop off pretty quickly and it only averaged a 0.5 score based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic through its first season. It also lost well over half of the audience from its Big Brother lead-in. But CBS does have Amazon onboard as a streaming partner, so perhaps that was enough to keep it going and to allow the network to keep some scripted programming on its schedule during the Summer months amidst the repeats and reality shows. There has been no word yet on the fate of third season series Zoo which also aired on CBS in the Summer and had the same ratings average (that one has a streaming deal with Netflix). I had considered both Salvation and Zoo to be certain cancellation candidates, but perhaps yesterday’s renewal of the former series suggests that the latter still has a chance to return for a fourth season.
Salvation follows a small group of scientists and government officials who discover that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It stars Santiago Cabrera, Jennifer Finnigan, Charlie Rowe, and Jacqueline Byers. The second season of the show will debut at some point next Summer.
There are still quite a number of Summer shows awaiting word on their fate. Be sure to stay tuned to this site and the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site for updates and breaking news.
I bet they see most of their audience on Amazon/Netflix for those two. They’re both unusual in terms of genre for CBS, so they must have a much different set of people watching than most CBS shows.