Things are changing over at USA. The network, not the country. The country is just going to keep doing its whole “democracy and drone strikes” thing for a while, but over the last year or so, the USA network has canceled both Psych and White Collar and picked up a ton of new shows. There’s one about diplomats in the Middle East, a supernatural thriller about ghost murderers, a barely futuristic drama from Carlton Cuse that stars Josh Holloway, an alien abduction drama from the writer of Annabelle, a show about hackers starring teen heartthrob Christian Slater, and probably six or seven that we’re forgetting about. Now, according to Deadline, the network has also canceled spy drama Covert Affairs, making room for some of those six or seven other shows.
Deadline says Covert Affairs was pulling in fairly solid ratings when people who watch new episodes a week later on their DVRs are taken into account, but the same day ratings seem like they were pretty terrible. “Dead last in live viewing among all original USA drama series” terrible, to be specific. That, combined with the fact that a show like this gets more and more expensive the longer it goes on, seem to have convinced USA to end the series.
Covert Affairs starred Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham as CIA people doing CIA things, and apparently the finale of its fifth—and now last—season ended on a cliffhanger with Perabo’s character deciding between a hot new CIA gig and a marriage proposal. Given the unexpected cancellation, viewers will now never get to find out what she picked. Unless the show gets picked up by Netflix or whatever. That’s always a possibility, even though it almost certainly won’t happen for a very low-rated USA drama.