Code Black canceled (officially) at CBS; no season 4 coming
In what is at least a somewhat surprising news to us, show executive producer Michael Seitzman confirmed on Twitter Wednesday night that the medical drama is officially being canceled after just three seasons on the air — and barely getting a chance to prove itself this season. We’ve wondered over the past two weeks whether or not the network would give the show a chance to prove itself by airing outside of May sweeps without a traditional lead-in … but apparently, no so much. They decided to go ahead and make this move now, one week after delivering the best ratings of the season.
Unfortunately, we don’t think that the ratings are the sole issue that CBS is dealing with here — instead, it is one pertaining to ownership. Code Black is an ABC Studios show and with that in mind, there was less of an incentive for the network to keep it around. In general, shows that come from outside studios have to be enormous hits to have a chance to stick around for some sort of substantial period of time. Think in terms of ones like The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, or Criminal Minds — even with the latter, CBS has let this crime procedural (which also comes via ABC) hang around for a long period of time before finally allowing it to come back for another season.
This past one has been a rough one for shows executive-produced by Seitzman, as Quantico was also canceled just a mere matter of weeks into the season. Ironically, the two cancellations have some similarities in that both aired really late in the season and it was pretty clear that their networks didn’t have a whole lot of hope for them. The biggest difference is that when it comes to Quantico, it actually was airing on a network with a studio investment — its ratings were just so poor that it didn’t actually matter.
Related – If you want, you can still preview the next new episodes of Code Black
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