Status: Cancelled
Airred: 2014-15, 2 Seasons Totaling 26 Episodes
Network: CBS
Starring: Halle Berry, Goran Visnjic, Pierce Gagnon, Hiroyuki Sanada, Camryn Manheim, Grace Gummer, Michael O’Neill
Series Website: www.cbs.com/shows/extant/
Description: In a thrilling drama, Berry will play an astronaut who returns home from a year-long solo mission in space and tries to reconnect with her husband and son in their everyday life. Her experiences in space and home lead to events that ultimately will change the course of human history. CBS.com
Why Was It Cancelled? This show was cancelled because apparently the networks do still pay close attention to the ratings despite what they may tell us. CBS had a partnership with Amazon that gave them exclusive streaming rights after the live episodes aired on broadcast and the network also had significant international financing backing the show. This arrangement made Extant profitable for CBS before even airing, so they weren’t losing money on the show (and they had a similar deal with recently cancelled Under the Dome). But apparently the ratings were too much of an eyesore for the network executives even though they regularly tell us these days that the overnight Nielsen results do not impact their decision-making as much. Extant had suffered from low ratings since its first season and its numbers fell even further this past Summer. The show had gone through a bit of a reboot in its second year as an attempt to boost its viewership, but but instead the ratings continued to slide. It averaged only a 0.7 rating based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic this past Summer, and it did not see much in the way of a lift from the Live+7 delayed viewing numbers (only about fifty percent). Apparently that was not good enough for CBS, even though they weren’t losing money on the show, and they decided to cancel it. And its unlikely that Amazon will elect to keep Extant going on its own as they have plenty of their own development in the pipeline and they made no move to pick up Under the Dome for a fourth season. Apparently it did wrap up most of its storylines at the end of its second season, so it won’t go out on a major cliffhanger.
Season to Date (StD) Ratings Results:
| Week | Airings | Live+SD Rtg | StD Avg | Tot Vwrs (MM) | Live+7 Rtg | Cancel Alert |
| 7/1/15 | 1 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 1.0 | 1.2 | Moderate |
| 7/8/15 | 2 | 0.8 | 0.8 | 5.1 | 1.3 | Moderate |
| 7/15/15 | 3 | 0.6 | 0.7 | 4.6 | 1.0 | Moderate |
| 7/22/15 | 4 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 4.3 | 1.1 | Moderate |
| 7/29/15 | 5 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 4.3 | 1.1 | Moderate |
| 8/5/15 | 6 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 4.3 | 1.1 | Medium |
| 8/12/15 | 7 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 4.5 | 1.0 | Medium |
| 8/19/15 | 8 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 4.5 | 1.1 | Medium |
| 8/26/15 | 9 | 0.8 | 0.7 | 4.9 | 1.1 | Medium |
| 9/2/15 | 10 | 0.6 | 0.7 | 4.7 | 1.0 | Medium |
| 9/9/15 | 11 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 4.5 | 1.0 | Medium |
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I wanted to like this one better than I did, and it had its moments, but I think it ultimately just ran out of steam, and the show was wearing out its welcome for me by the end.
It had a sort of “Midwich Cuckoos”/”Village of the Damned” feel to it, and I think that as long as it played to the cosmic horror elements of those origins, it worked for me, though I’m not sure how long that could have worked as the foundation of a television series. The “Billy Jack with aliens” angle of the second season plot arcs didn’t really work as well for me, though, and I suspect it didn’t work well with other viewers, either, considering the eventual cancellation.
I wonder what might have happened, had the show’s creators taken a different approach to the second season, maybe something a little darker, edgier, and creepier?
I believe that the network dictated the direction of the show’s second season because they wanted to ratings to improve. It didn’t work, though.
I have always been a fan of science fiction/fantasy. The only shows I was following (3) were cancelled.
The ones with any depth are cut off.
Despite what I feel is at points a slow moving storyline, “Extant” is definitely one of the better written scifi series on television right now. Intelligent, engaging and a fascinating glimpse into what could be our future.
Agree. That is probably why it was cancelled. Too close to the latest theories connected to unsolved
alien mysteries. I have read many of the books on these theories. Very unsettling but possibly true.