Is Cloak & Dagger renewed for season 3 by Freeform, canceled?

With today’s finale right around the corner, now certainly does feel like the perfect time to ask — is Cloak & Dagger going to be renewed at Freeform? This is a show that debuted with huge aspirations, and it does continue to be a show that tells a lot of fascinating comic-book stories.

Here’s the problem: Inherently, telling cool comic-book stories by no means guarantees that you’re going to get another season. There are very few things that actually do other than the ratings. Alas, the ratings for the second season are far from where they were during much of the first season — it was back then we saw this show generating a 0.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic and more than 570,000 live viewers. Now, we’re seeing this same show generate ultimately a 0.1 rating and just over 350,000 live viewers. Not exactly the best retention in the world.

So why the big drop? Sure, we figure that there are some live viewers who switched over to watching via DVR/streaming, but we do have another question here: Did Freeform bring the series back a little bit too soon? We understand why they didn’t want to wait an incredibly long period of time to get more new episodes on the air — Freeform recognizes that most of their audience is really young, and they have to load up on episodes within the first few seasons of many of their shows. Their fear is mostly that their target demo will start to age out of their shows, or just move on to other things. That’s probably all the more threatening within the age of Netflix; today’s young-adult viewers aren’t really growing up in an era where appointment-viewing was necessary. they can watch shows when they want, however they want. They can take a look at series on their own terms.

Quality-wise, we do still think that Cloak & Dagger has that going for it and then some. If there are some concerns with this series, we don’t think that they’ve got anything at all to do with what we’re actually seeing on screen. It’s more about continuing to get people to watch.

Are we confident in a Cloak & Dagger season 3?

At the moment, we’re cautiously optimistic. It’s not like Freeform has a number of other super-successful shows waiting in the wings at the moment! Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists was a ratings disappointment, Good Trouble didn’t exactly set the world on fire, Shadowhunters was canceled, and The Bold Type was never a huge ratings monster. Siren is one of their more-successful shows, but it’s not necessarily generating any sort of eye-popping numbers for its current run of episodes.

We should find out some more news as to a Cloak & Dagger renewal over the coming weeks. With that, the #1 advice we can hand down is to stay tuned, and keep checking back for some more updates.

Do you want to see Cloak & Dagger renewed for a season 3 at Freeform? Be sure to share right now in the comments, and check back soon for some other insight.