Friday night cancellations: The Mosquito Coast, One Of Us Is Lying, Vampire Academy all get the axe
Apple TV+ and Peacock both took time to knock off a few shows before heading out to beat the weekend rush
Look: There’s never a good time to have your TV show get canceled. It’s a life-changingly awful part of the entertainment industry that nevertheless happens all the time, disappointing fans, putting people out of jobs, and cutting creative endeavors short.
But there is probably a worst time to get canceled, and that’s Friday night. Nobody wants to have their show shut down, but nobody wants to be the last thing some network executive shuffles into the recycling bin before calling it a weekend and rolling out the door, confident that it’ll get lost in the shuffle of the entertainment news cycle by the time Monday morning rolls around.
So, here’s to the casualties of this week’s quiet bloodbath, as two different streamers knocked three existing shows off their rosters tonight. First up: Apple TV+, which announced tonight that it’d be ending Justin Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast after two seasons. Theroux starred in the series (which is based off the book by his uncle, novelist Paul Theroux) as an American inventor who uproots his family to live in Latin America. Melissa George, Logan Polish, and Gabriel Bateman all co-starred.
Meanwhile, Peacock knocked off two series of its own, both YA dramas, with One Of Us Is Lying and Vampire Academy both getting the axe. One Of Us Is Lying, based off the book by Karen M. McManus, managed to make it for two seasons at the NBC-affiliated streamer, as its young cast (Annalisa Cochrane, Chibuikem Uche, Marianly Tejada, Cooper van Grootel, Barrett Carnahan, Jessica McLeod, and Mark McKenna) tried to figure out which one of their classmates was a murderer. Vampire, meanwhile, got slain after just one season; although it got decent reviews, Julie Plec’s latest trip into the world of vampire teenagers couldn’t score a second season at the streamer.