Well, this is just getting goddamn ridiculous at this point: Deadline reports that yet another network has decided to shitcan one of its shows, after already filming an entire season of it, with news breaking today that the fourth season of Snowpiercer won’t be airing on TNT. (Which, shock of shocks, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, bold pioneers in the “paying creative people to make something and then not bothering to air it” sciences.)
To be (an extremely tiny amount of) fair, Snowpiercer had become something of an outlier on TNT at this point, being the network’s last remaining original scripted series floating amidst a sea of reruns. Also, a spokesperson for TNT claimed that it had been working with the show’s producers, Tomorrow Studios, to help shop the show around. But even so: It’s a damn lousy way to treat a bunch of people who went out and did all the hard work of filming a TV show for you, and another data point in the increasingly worrying trend of treating that kind of output as totally disposable, even by the already loose standards of TV. (See also AMC’s recent decision to dump the completed second season of Courtney B. Vance’s 61st Street.)
It’s especially notable to do this to a show that’s been around for as long as Snowpiercer has; the series, which stars Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly, isn’t a ratings juggernaut or anything, but it’s got enough fans that you’d think it would be worth it to give them an actual fourth season and a finale—especially if it already, y’know, exists, and is just sitting on a hard drive somewhere.
Deadline notes that the Snowpiercer dumping was apparently tied to all the efforts WBD made last year to turn TV shows into tax cuts, a practice the entertainment giant has said it’s now done with. (Mostly, apparently.) We did get one small note of optimism regarding this practice earlier this week, at least: Starz made headlines by picking up the already-completed second season of Minx, after HBO tax cut it into the trash.
