Neil Gaiman's Dead Boy Detectives is dead, boys

Hands together, ladies and gentleman, as we welcome a big name to the Friday Night TV Murder Pile—our recurring exploration of television executives’ natural tendency to take advantage of weekend indifference to get the dead weight off their schedules late on a Friday night—as Neil Gaiman makes the trip to the Pile. Gaiman is making the jaunt courtesy of his Netflix series Dead Boy Detectives, which has just been axed after a single season on the streamer.

This, despite having gotten attached—after some fairly wiggly shenanigans, which saw it developed, and then rejected, at Max—to a show that’s been successful enough to at least get another season, i.e., the streaming adaptation of Gaiman’s Sandman comics. Dead Boy Detectives, besides existing at least in part to tee us up for easy cancellation headline jokes, starred George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri as a couple of ghost detectives solving eight episodes’ worth of supernatural mysteries, and now, exactly, no more than that. The series was developed for TV by Steven Yockey, who showran it with Beth Schwartz; all of this happened under the aegis of DC TV guy Greg Berlanti, who’s been over at Netflix for a while now. The show got decent reviews, and perfectly fine opening numbers, but, per Variety, its viewership fell off a cliff within a week or two of release.

There’s also, of course, the Gaiman in the room, as the author has now become subject to allegations of sexual assault, misconduct, and other inappropriate behaviors that have, in recent months, taken his name from clear and obvious “asset” when it comes to boosting a show like this to “uncomfortable question mark.” We’re not saying that Netflix would have kept the show alive in world where Gaiman didn’t have these allegations hanging over his head—the streamer is notoriously data-driven in a profoundly unsympathetic way when it comes to wielding the axe—but we can’t help thinking it probably didn’t help.