Reef Break cancelled by ABC, will not be shopped to other networks
Reef Break has been cancelled by ABC after season 1, and Poppy Montgomery’s crime caper reportedly won’t be offered to other networks.
ABC has pulled the plug on its summer TV crime drama Reef Break.
The network announced Friday that it had cancelled Reef Break after one season, which didn’t come as much of a surprise given the show’s low ratings. Of the show’s 13 episodes, only four of them reached 2 million live viewers on Friday nights.
Even adding in the people who watched on DVR, the Poppy Montgomery-led show only grew its audience to the high 2 million/low 3 million range.
That meant Reef Break’s total viewership was lower than the average live audience of most TV shows.
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Based on an idea by Montgomery, the sudsy crime drama starred the Unforgettable and Without A Trace actress as Cat Chambers, a former criminal turned professional surfer who helped the government of the fictional Reef Island fight organized crime.
There was a soap-opera element, too: Cat’s new partner Wyatt Cole (Desmond Chiam) was sleeping with her, but her ex-husband Jake Elliot (Ray Stevenson) still had feelings for her, despite carrying on a relationship with Wyatt’s half-sister and Cat’s boss Ana Dumont (Melissa Bonne).
With that kind of messy plotting and a Friday time slot, it’s no surprise that Reef Break didn’t catch on with ABC viewers—who might not even have known it was on, because of limited ads.
But those weren’t the only things that worked against it. The show wasn’t an ABC project; it was an international program, sold to French broadcaster M6 before ABC Studios International came on as a co-producer and brought it to the United States. (Think of Rookie Blue and Motive, which aired on ABC for years but were actually Canadian crime dramas.)
From a business perspective, it would make more sense for ABC to give that time slot to a show they’re wholly invested in, not just co-producing. Plus, being filmed in Australia as opposed to a place like Los Angeles or New York, it was likely more expensive to make.
Yet all the business factors aside, the bottom line is that Reef Break‘s low ratings got it exactly what it had earned, viewership-wise: cancellation.
Don’t get your hopes up for another network to come in and save it, either: with showrunner Ken Sanzel already working on another pilot for CBS, Deadline reports the show will not be shopped to any other places.
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Will you miss Reef Break? Did you watch it this season or even know that it was on? Tell us your reaction to the cancellation news in the comments.