AppleTV+ forced to cancel Dick Turpin after Noel Fielding reportedly bailed mid-series

Bad news for fans of AppleTV+’s The Completely Made-Up Adventures Of Dick Turpin: The gag-heavy historical comedy series has abruptly been canceled ahead of a now-scrapped release of its second season, amid reports that star and writer Noel Fielding walked away from the shoot three-quarters of the way through production.

This is per Deadline, quoting a report that originated in British tabloid The Sun, which says Fielding didn’t return to the show after breaking for the holidays late last year. Given that he’s, well, Dick Turpin, there was no way to make a TV show without him, and so the whole thing has been trashed, with the studio disbanding the cast and crew.

We had a decent amount of fun with Turpin, a show that never seemed to be in too much danger of taking itself too seriously, as it told (as promised) massively fabricated stories about the life of the real-life outlaw. For all the series’ merits, though, it definitely feels like it’s about to be completely eclipsed by the story of its demise: Fielding is a veteran comic talent, so the idea of him just not coming back to work (and thus putting a bunch of people out of their jobs), apparently out of the blue, is pretty unquestionably wild. (Because our brains are completely ruined by feel-good British TV, we can’t help but think of it in terms of that time Ian threw his cake in the garbage several seasons back on Fielding’s day job, The Great British Bake Off.) We can only hope we’ll get more of this story some time soon, because it’s one of the more ignominious deaths we’ve ever seen a show like this face.