LA Fire & Rescue, Hot Wheels Ultimate Challenge canceled at NBC
Today, NBC gave us a little more information about the future of its summer unscripted lineup; in the process of that, they also revealed cancellations.
Per a new report from Deadline, the folks at the network are going to be moving forward without LA Fire & Rescue as well as Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge. It is hard to produce that much of a specific reaction to this, largely because how networks determine the future of some of their reality / documentary content is a little bit tricky to gauge.
In particular, you could have argued that the ratings for LA Fire & Rescue (which averaged close to a 0.3 in the 18-49 demographic) were enough to bring it back. However, the network may not have thought there was much of a need to continue it, and some of their game-show content in particular is extremely cost-effective. There is a reason why a lot of major networks lean on this sort of thing in the summer months, when there are traditionally fewer viewers around.
As for Hot Wheels, we mostly understood it as a way for the network to try and capitalize on established IP in an attempt to try to bring in a lot of viewers. Given the success of Barbie in particular, we wonder if there was a big effort to try and see if some other content in a similar vein could work. Of course, Barbie was a scripted movie that tried to subvert expectations and delivered something phenomenal; it was working on this elevated plane. The Hot Wheels show had some potential, but its concept was a little bit muddled and could have used some additional time to incubate and be developed. That just didn’t happen here.
Of course, we’ll let you know if either one of these properties gets magically revived down the road; for the time being, it seems doubtful.
What do you think about LA Fire & Rescue and Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge being canceled?
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