Sad news tonight for fans of the funnier side of murder: NBC has canceled its two-season comedy series Trial & Error, after an unsuccessful effort to shop it to another network. Per THR, Warner Bros. TV is still looking for a new home for the series—which stars Nicholas D’Agosto as a defense attorney who finds himself trying multiple murder cases in East Peck, one of those classic sitcom enclaves of bizarre but lovable weirdos—but its days at NBC are done.
The unfortunate evidence on display here is that Trial & Errors’ ratings have never been all that strong, with the show’s second season (co-starring Kristin Chenoweth as eccentric heiress Lavinia Peck-Foster) pulling in less than 2 million viewers per episode, a major dip from the series’ John Lithgow-starring first outing. The critical notices have been uniformly great, though, with our own Will Harris dubbing it “one of the funniest shows on television at the moment,” and delivering plenty of character testimony on behalf of East Peck as a place worth visiting, week-in and week-out. For now, though, the show’s sentence is clear; as such, we grant it the only clemency available to us, which is to end this Newswire immediately, so as to spare it from having to suffer through any more torturous legal metaphors.