Cancellation Watch Breaking News: FX Renews Legion for a Second Season

FX announced today that their X-Men spin-off series Legion has been renewed for a second season. The news does not come as a big surprise even though its ratings have been only passable the past few weeks. The show started out with a 0.7 rating based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic, very good for a cable series these days, though it has slipped from there and been in the 0.4 range the past couple of weeks. But it has been more than doubling its numbers with delayed viewing (more important to the cable channels than the broadcast nets), and I’m betting that this show’s survival was not heavily leveraged on the linear viewing. The second season will likely be eight episodes like the first and it will probably debut in early 2018. This series, which is not tied to the big screen X-Men franchise, centers on the super-powerful mutant Legion who is the son of Charles Xavier in the comics (that connection has not been established in the show, however).

In other renewal news, Netflix has officially picked up A Series of Unfortunate Events–based on the children’s books of the same name–for a second season.  I had previously heard that the streaming service had committed to two seasons upfront, so I believe that this renewal was pretty much assumed all along, but Netflix has made it official now.  The first season of the show averaged 3.8 million viewers per episode in the 18-49 demographic according to Symphony AM (numbers that Netflix disputes, though they don’t provide their own stats).  That put it above Luke Cage and the second season of Daredevil as far as viewership goes.  The next season of A Series of Unfortunate Events will like bow in early 2018.

Note that the ratings delays continue due to the Nielsen outage over the weekend (or H.G. Wells going back in time to try and alter history and save low-rated Time After Time).  Once the Sunday numbers are available, the latest Cancellation Watch post will follow which will have the updated Scorecard.