Reef Break canceled; season 2 not happening at ABC
The Poppy Montomgery series, which had a rather unappealing title in addition to some not-great ratings over the summer, had longshot odds to come back for another run. This is even when you consider the fact that the production was fairly low-cost for the network, due largely to some of the bill being shared elsewhere. This marks the third notable cancellation of an ABC summer show in the past year-plus, following Take Two back in 2018 and then also Grand Hotel a little bit earlier this year.
At least Grand Hotel had a slightly better chance at finding some success than Reef Break ever did. Just consider some of the circumstances here, as the latter show had to air on a difficult Thursday timeslot that was often preempted in some markets by NFL preseason football. In general, it didn’t have a lot of promotion and the picturesque setting here didn’t work anywhere near as well as it does for Hawaii Five-0, Magnum PI, or even a notable British series in Death in Paradise.
In general, one of the questions that we wonder after the fact with this cancellation is whether or not we’re going to be seeing ABC take too many chances with some summer scripted fare, especially some that come in part from international production houses. The experiments haven’t worked out all that well, with Rookie Blue being the last one that we’d consider to be something close to a major success story.
As for whether or not a Reef Break season 2 is going to happen elsewhere, we’d consider it for now to be extremely unlikely. There’s no reason to think that another network is going to be angling to pick the show up at the moment with the ratings that it had, especially since acquisitions are often a fairly-hard sell in the first place.
What do you think about the cancellation of Reef Break?
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