‘Hell on Wheels’: AMC renews Western for season 3

If you love “Hell on Wheels,” then you will be rather pleased that the wheels are going to keep on turning for a little while longer. In an announcement on Monday, it was revealed that the show is going to be coming back for more courtesy of a third season.

In some ways, you could see this renewal as a surprise given how different the ratings are for those show compared to AMC’s juggernaut series “The Walking Dead.” With that being said, the show still averaged around 2.4 million viewers an episode, which is pretty good by cable standards. It also reflects the network’s key philosophy of giving its series key time to go. “Rubicon” and “The Killing” are really the only two shows that we have seen this network do away with early on during their runs, and this “wait and see” strategy paid off huge for both “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” who now each have some of the largest overall audiences out of any show on television.

So where will the Western go next? It’s hard to say, but what we do know is that it will be doing whatever it plans on it without executive producers Joe and Tony Gayton. Their contract expired with the show after season 2, and they are going on to work on some new projects elsewhere. This is the second time in two years that an AMC show has seen a showrunner change, as Glen Mazzara stepped in for Frank Darabont during production of “The Walking Dead” season 2.

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