ABC boss explains ‘Castle’ season 8, ‘Nashville’ season 4 cancellations

It is not an easy pill for many to swallow losing so many shows this past week, and on ABC, the feeling is probably worse than almost anywhere else. We no longer have “Castle,” “Nashville,” “The Muppets,” or “Galavant” on the air, and while some of these cancellations were expected, they are at the same time rather sad.

In specifically addressing both “Nashville” and “Castle” ending (per The Hollywood Reporter), new ABC programming head Channing Dungey made it clear that it was mostly a financial decision to move beyond the show after so many years:

“At the end of the day, we didn’t feel that even though Castle and Nashville were wonderful shows and good performers for a long time, the future for us didn’t lie in those shows … Looking at ratings, our own finances and looking at new development, decisions came down to the wire, which is the difficult thing about these jobs as we weigh and measure different things.”

The “Castle” decision is probably the more understandable of the two, given that a good percentage of fans were already angry at the idea of renewing the series for another season without Katic. The mistake that ABC made here is not announcing months ago that season 8 was the last, that way the show could have built for weeks to a proper conclusion rather than a tacked-on coda that was obviously just filmed as a contingency.

Meanwhile, “Nashville” fans probably have a further reason to be upset, and we wish for their sake that the show got a 10-episode final season to at least properly send it off into the sunset.