Amazon killed one of its critical darlings tonight, with Variety reporting that the streaming service has just served up a curtain call for the classical music dramedy Mozart In The Jungle. Showrun by Paul Weitz, the series was a surprise prestige hit for Amazon during the early days of its move into streaming content, scoring a shock win for Best Televised Comedy at the 2016 Golden Globes.
Starring Lola Kirke and Gael Garcia Bernal—who won his own Globe for Best Actor that same night—the series tracked the intrigues and politics lurking behind New York’s cutthroat classical music scene. The series aired its fourth, and now final, season back in mid-February.
It’s hard not to see Mozart’s cancellation as yet another casualty of Amazon’s recent shift in TV priorities. The directive—supposedly coming down from on-high, courtesy of CEO Jeff Bezos—is for fewer critically beloved, small-scale projects, and more big, expensive, inescapable blockbusters, like the company’s upcoming Lord Of The Rings TV series, which will allegedly cost as much as a billion dollars by the time the dust has settled. That doesn’t necessarily leave a lot of breathing space for enjoyably bingeable takes on eccentric, passionate music-makers, it seems.