Instinct canceled at CBS after two seasons; no season 3 coming
While there are more stories left to tell for Instinct season 2, we come bearing bad news on the future — the series won’t be returning.
In a new post on Twitter, showrunner Michael Rauch confirmed that CBS will not be renewing the Alan Cumming and Bojana Novakovic-led drama for a third season. There are two more episodes coming this Sunday, and then the series finale will air on August 25. In his posts, Rauch thanks the cast, crew, and all of the fans for getting into the series over the past couple of years.
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Instinct faced an uphill battle from the start, premiering in season 1 as a midseason replacement in the spring of 2018. It generated solid enough ratings for a season 2 renewal, but unlike season 1, this latest batch of episodes premiered in the summer outside of the proper 2018-19 television season. This impacted the show’s exposure and performance greatly. This season has averaged a 0.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic in live numbers, down by 50% from the season 1 average overall. The show did have studio connections with CBS, which often does help ones with lower ratings stick around; unfortunately, the numbers here were too low to justify it even in this case.
The shame here is that in losing both Elementary and also Instinct this month, television is losing two of its best mystery shows — ones that are reliant upon strong case-of-the-week storytelling over such other familiar tropes like a will-they-or-won’t-they romance or an abundance of action sequences. Both shows also featured a platonic, layered relationship between their lead characters. Instinct was a breakthrough drama for CBS in how Dylan Reinhart was an openly-gay main character, something that is extremely rare for network television. That’s even more the case for CBS, a network not necessarily known for its diversity among main characters.
If you wanted to sit down and watch a great mystery unfold with likable leads and creative twists, Instinct was your show … and hopefully, it will still be for the final three episodes.
Instinct marks the second notable cancellation of the day; earlier today, Syfy chose to end Krypton after two seasons of its own.