Well, it’s that time of year again, folks: The leaves have departed the trees, the pumpkins are rotting in a way that’s no longer purely decorative, and the TV shows have started to die. Yes, we’ve now hit that bit in the TV-broadcasting season where networks begin to decide whether shows—especially first season shows that have yet to put down roots, if we haven’t already throttled this metaphor half to death—are worth bringing back for another year.
We already got a few signs of early frost late last month, when Marvel killed off yet another TV project, Freeform’s Cloak & Dagger, and AMC broke our hearts by ending Lodge 49 after two seasons on the air. But now, two brand new series have fallen from their lofty locations—paranormal cop show The InBetween at NBC, and Suits spinoff Pearson at USA—suggesting that the time of the Dark Harvest is finally at hand.
The InBetween starred Harriet Dyer as a young woman whose psychic visions help her solve crimes alongside her dad and his cop partner. Pearson, meanwhile, starred Gina Torres as her fiery Suits character, attempting to navigate the ugly waters of Chicago city politics. The former show burned through its initial run of 10 episodes between May and August, while Pearson wrapped up its own back-end-less existence in September. Now they’re both doomed to be relegated to the most dull sort of TV trivia question imaginable, the same dustbin of “Wait, really, that existed?” detritus that also consumed shows like Awake, Forever, and any number of other slightly drab-looking dramas that dot the IMDB pages of otherwise successful people.
Meanwhile, please consider this a reminder that Cancellation Season is not the same thing as Bloodbath Day, which is the moment in spring when the networks summarily execute all the other shows they don’t want to move forward with in a year. And hey: Maybe buy any TV producers you know a drink tonight, because their holidays totally suck.