NBC Makes Decision On Timeless Season 3 and It’s A Good News / Bad News Kind Of Deal For Fans.
Deadline reports:
- ‘Timeless’ Canceled By NBC After 2 Seasons, Might Get Series Finale Movie
But what about Rufus? This is bad news for Timeless fans — for a second consecutive year, NBC has canceled the time-travel series. This time, NBC postponed the renewal decision until after the May upfronts; it comes just days before the options of the series’ cast are set to expire.
That was in part because the network and Timeless producer Sony Pictures TV had been discussing doing a two-hour movie that would resolve the cliffhanger in the recent Season 2 finale and wrap the stories on the show, giving fans closure. I hear the two sides have not been able to make the economics work so far but conversations continue, and NBC appears interested.
Sony TV is known for fighting for its shows. The studio already tried shopping Timeless to other buyers and is expected to explore every avenue, but I hear it is not planning to extend the cast’s options, which expire June 30, as it is pretty costly. If a movie materializes, everyone will have to make a new deal, but given how invested all stars of the show have been, engaging the fans on social media, that likely won’t be a problem…
…Doing two-hour movie finales is very expensive as it involves ramping up production and reassembling a team with little financial upside for the series’ network or studio. The economics are especially challenging on broadcast TV; the only series that has done it in the past decade or so was CBS’ CSI, which already had made a ton of money for CBS parent CBS Corp., spawning a billion-dollar franchise for CBS TV Studios. On SVOD, Netflix recently did it with its cult sci-fi drama series Sense8.
The new cancellation of Timeless will be hard to swallow for fans who had been campaigning for a renewal, flooding NBC’s Twitter feed with #RenewTimeless messages.. For a second year in a row, Timeless ranked as No.1 on USA Today’s Save our Shows poll.
And also for the second year in a row, the series ended its season finale with a massive cliffhanger. SPOILER ALERT. In the Season 2 ender, soldier Wyatt (Matt Lanter) and historian Lucy (Abigail Spencer) return from their latest mission without their trusted engineer Rufus (Malcolm Barrett), who was killed. But in a last-second twist, an upgraded Lifeboat shows up with future versions of Wyatt and Lucy emerging to ask, “You guys want to get Rufus back or what?”…
