Freeform delivers bad news for Cruel Summer fans
It’s bad news for fans of the crime anthology series Cruel Summer. Freeform will not renew the series for another season.
It’s one blow after another for a lot of crime drama fans right now. Shortly after the decision by Prime Video to cancel Shelter, Freeform has made the decision to cancel shows. One of those is Cruel Summer, which aired its second season finale back in July of this year.
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news, sharing that Good Trouble is also canceled. The two shows were Freeform’s last scripted originals, marking a very sad day for fans of shows on the younger-skewed ABC channel.
Why was Cruel Summer canceled?
According to the report, there are two main reasons for the anthology series being canceled. And yes, you can probably guess them because they are cited all the time. It was due to the costs of production vs. the linear ratings.
The linear ratings weren’t good enough to justify the costs of production. This comes off the back of the SAG-AFTRA strikes coming to an end, which see a chance to actor costs. On top of that, the WGA strikes ended shortly before the SAG-AFTRA strikes, where there were other cost increases. It’s not surprising (but is disappointing) that networks are opting to cancel shows.
Cruel Summer Season 2 didn’t meet the performance of the first season in linear ratings. With such a big drop between seasons, there will be concerns of another big drop in the third season linear ratings.
In some good news, fans aren’t left on a major cliffhanger with this series. The answer to Luke’s murder came with a twist that many possibly didn’t see coming. As an anthology series, there was no cliffhanger left over at the end. Instead, fans wanted to know what the next storyline was going to be.
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Cruel Summer is available to stream on Hulu.