CarterMatt Awards 2018: Will Timeless, Salvation, Shadowhunters, Daredevil win Bring It Back Award?
Welcome to the 2018 CarterMatt Awards! This is our seventh annual year-end series where we as a site celebrate some of the best that TV has to offer! Our staff collectively hand-picks nominees across a wide array of different fields, and then leaves it up to you to declare the winner. We’ve had a fun time over the years with these awards and creating some fun debate throughout the month of December. Hopefully, this time around is no exception!
Today we’re discussing the Bring It Back Award — a new category at the CarterMatt Awards this year! One of the things that we talk about throughout the year is how to help shows struggling in the ratings, and also some of the things that viewers can do to save them after the fact. With all of the discussion around canceled shows, it only felt right to give an extra boost to one of them via an award! This is meant to recognize the show most deserving of being brought back for another season. The only criteria here is that the nominated show has to have been canceled at some point in 2018; we’re not dipping further into the past here.
Voting rules – Vote however often you’d like! If you are having issues with voting, a handy guide can be found later on in this article.
The nominees
The Brave – A wonderful little-engine that could military drama that officially concluded its run earlier this year on NBC. Despite its cancellation, it had a fierce, loyal following — one of the reasons why it managed to win our CarterMatt TV Madness tournament back in the spring. Watching that audience rally despite being a fairly low seed in the competition was truly a wonderful thing to behold! We just wish it amounted in another season!
Daredevil – This wound is still fairly fresh, as it was just recently when Netflix decided that they wanted to send the Marvel series out to pasture. There’s already a lot of controversy surrounding how the series was canceled and whether or not Disney’s upcoming streaming service had a role to play; regardless, this was a show coming off of an extraordinary season 3 and clearly deserved another chance to keep going.
Good Behavior – The TNT drama was only officially canceled this fall, despite having its second season wrap up all the way back in 2017. We do think part of the reason for the delay was folks behind the scenes trying to scramble to figure out if there was a way to do more. The Michelle Dockery drama was criminally underrated throughout the entirety of its run, and we remain disappointed that it didn’t get more viewers than it did.
Salvation – It’s getting really hard to have a successful summer series anymore. Salvation did everything that it could in season 2 to deliver a series of shocking twists, including changes to the Presidency and an epic finale cliffhanger like no other. Yet, somehow none of this was enough to cement the series with a third season. Alas, we may never get the cliffhanger resolution we want, but we still want to give it praise for being as good as it was.
Scorpion – It was a celebration of geniuses and the scientific community told through the lens of a CBS procedural. It was funny, original, but also heartfelt when it needed to be. We thought for the longest time that it would find a way to stick around for either syndication reasons or DVR ratings, but in the end, the network decided to move on after the live ratings dropped by a fairly-large margin during season 4 leaving us with a lot of balls in the air when it comes to the story.
Shadowhunters – If you haven’t heard of #SaveShadowhunters, have you even been on the internet this year? The quest to save the canceled Freeform drama has become a global phenomenon, with fan campaigns going on everywhere from Los Angeles to New York to London to even South Korea. While nothing has come of the efforts to get a season 4 as of yet, Shadowhunters fans have scored the show many awards victories, including at the People’s Choice Awards.
Take Two – A fun ABC series that never really got the chance that it deserved. It premiered in a tough timeslot, was preempted regularly for preseason football in select markets, and didn’t really ever have a proper lead-in. Yet, the mystery series starring Rachel Bilson and Eddie Cibrian did have a loyal audience and we do like to think that with a different set of variables, it would still be on the air.
Timeless – This is the strangest situation for any of the shows listed here, mostly in that Timeless does technically have two more episodes left — they’ve been put together into a movie event on December 20. Yet, there is no guarantee for more episodes following that and the movie in some ways was meant to provide closure for most of the main storylines. We don’t think that this has to be the end of the road for the Time Team, though; we’re still holding out hope.