Bring It Back 2019: Should Timeless, The Gifted, Santa Clarita Diet, Luke Cage be saved?
Welcome to the second annual Bring It Back Tournament! This is a tradition that we’ve started up last year at CarterMatt with one goal in mind — shining a spotlight on shows that are truly worthy of a second life that we don’t think should’ve ended in the first place. We do this through polls that allow your voice to be heard also! We’re in the month of May, and with that, cancellations are going to be running rampant throughout the month.
We’re going to be announcing entrants in this year’s Bring It Back in waves (so if you don’t see the show you are most disappointed in ending it may still be coming up!), mostly as more cancellations come out over the next week or so. Today marks our second wave, focusing (just as we did in the first wave) on six shows that have already been canceled/ended on their respective networks. The criteria is simple — we’re focusing here on shows that aired their final episode, or will air their final episode, at some point from September 2018 until September 2019.
How do you vote for which show should come back? You can do that at the bottom of this article! There are more specific voting rules/technical information at the bottom of this article. The two shows with the highest votes in round one will move forward to round two, and voting will remain open here for five days, from now until Monday, May 13 at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time.
With all of this spelled out, let’s go ahead and get now to the next six shows!
Elementary – Technically, the CBS show isn’t quite over yet — but it will be a little bit later this summer with its final season! Consider this almost a preemptive strike since we know that come a day or two after the series finale, we’re going to be feeling little other than sadness that the show is at an end.
The Gifted – One of the earlier cancellations made by the major networks this year, The Gifted ended maybe in part to lower ratings … but we do also wonder if the X-Men rights heading to Disney had a thing to do with it. This has been a strange time to be a superhero show with that big Fox deal in mind. There was talk at one point about the show being shopped around, but we haven’t heard anything on the other side.
Luke Cage – Speaking on which, Luke Cage was one of the first shocking cancellations of the whole Marvel – Netflix era, mostly because Iron Fist never quite had the reviews of some of the other shows that made up the Defenders universe. The end of the Mike Colter series was really the biggest sign that there was something terribly wrong, and more bad news was going to be coming.
Salvation – If you reflect on the past year, is there a canceled show that ended on a bigger cliffhanger? If there is, it’s sure hard to think about it! Season 2 did very little beyond make us clamor out lout for a season 3, especially with the story getting set for some sort of shocking, decisive turn. Yet, now we don’t get to see what that turn would be.
Santa Clarita Diet – One of the most notable, non-Marvel casualties of this new era of Netflix. Maybe the idea of a show about cannibalism was just too extreme for most viewers, but we personally found it arguably the most hilarious program that the streaming service had to offer. Where else could Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant star as a suburban couple who stores the bodies of bad people in a freezer?
Timeless – Fittingly, we think that the impact of the NBC series is timeless, as it’s been almost five months now since the finale movie aired and the desire for more is still very much out there. Even if the movie did tie together many of the series’ larger loose ends, it certainly laid the groundwork in the closing seconds for something more to come down the line — if there is a chance for the producers to explore it.