Colin Mochrie says Whose Line Is It Anyway? is ending next year
Mochrie announced that the CW series will film its final episodes in January 2023
Colin Mochrie, long-time star of The CW’s Whose Line Is It Anyway?, has revealed that the series will be taping its final season soon. In a recent tweet, Mochrie announced that January 2023 will see him, Ryan Stiles, Wayne Brady, and host Aisha Tyler (plus, presumably, the show’s usual rotating series of fourth slot performers) getting together to film one more batch of episodes of the long-running short-form improv show, which originated in the UK before being imported to ABC in the 1990s, and then revived by The CW in 2013.
As of next year, Whose Line will have actually run longer in its CW incarnation than it did on ABC under the tenure of host Drew Carey (although the ABC version produced more overall episodes, 219 to the revival’s current 164). That longevity isn’t exactly hard to explain, either: The show is, presumably, dirt-cheap to produce, and all of the participants remain sharp improvisers deep into their third decades with the series. (Also, it gets an extra episode added to its order every time a snobby comedy nerd explains that short-form isn’t “real” improv, which helps.)
News of Whose Line’s cancellation comes amid what appears to be an increasingly complete skeletization of The CW as a whole, as numerous long-running shows (including Stargirl, The Flash, Riverdale, and more) have all announced that they’ll be wrapping up their runs shortly, roughly coinciding with the network’s purchase by Nexstar Media Group. Whose Line ending is actually kind of surprising in that context, since Nexstar appears to be pushing The CW as a whole away from scripted programming, and it’s hard to get more unscripted than Wayne Brady busting out a Hoedown to the familiar strains of a Laura Hall piano solo.