5 Great Prime Video Shows That Were Unfairly Cancelled After One Season, “A Complete Travesty”

Launched in 2016, Prime Video is the culmination of a decade of rebrands that began with Amazon Unbox in 2006 and passed through Amazon Video on Demand and Amazon Instant Video before Amazon finally split the service into its own standalone subscription. Backed by a company willing to lose money on content for years in the service of membership growth, the platform built a library that could compete with Netflix on scale almost immediately. Since then, Jeffrey Bezos’ bottomless pockets have produced genuine hits, with The Boys turning into one of the platform’s flagship franchises, while Invincible proved animated superhero storytelling could carry the same weight. In addition, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power also became Amazon’s answer to the tentpole fantasy boom post-Game of Thrones, Fallout adapted a beloved video game into a hit, and The Expanse proved the platform could sustain ambitious sci-fi epics.

Despite all that, just as quickly as Prime Video seems willing to spend on new IPs, the company also walks away fairly easily, frequently canceling first seasons. A good critical reception and even positive word-of-mouth don’t always help a Prime Video series to survive, as the pressure of immediate viewership gain convinces the higher ups that’s better to jump ship and let it sink. That’s all too bad, because Prime Video has some genuinely great series that deserved more than a single season.

5) Night Sky

Night Sky gave two Oscar winners a great genre showcase that Amazon canceled before it could find an audience. In Night Sky, Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons starred as Irene and Franklin York, an elderly couple who spend the series guarding a chamber in their backyard that leads to an abandoned planet. The show uses that premise to explore aging and marriage rather than escalating action, which explains why the show struggled to find an audience right away. Still, Night Sky premiered in2022 to good reviews that praised its lead performances above all else. 

Prime Video leaned hard into Night Sky‘s science fiction hook for marketing purposes, partnering with Amazon Web Services, SES, and Intelsat to beam the premiere episode into outer space, making it the first television series ever distributed beyond Earth. Sadly, none of that translated into a large enough audience to offset the production’s costs. In hindsight, the marketing strategy might have worked against the show, as audience members expecting a wild sci-fi adventure were understandably frustrated by the quiet drama.

4) Three Pines

Alfred Molina starred in Three Pines as Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, a series that adapted Louise Penny’s eighteen-book mystery series about a detective investigating murders in a small Quebec village. The show structured its eight episodes around four separate cases while also weaving in the disappearance of a young Indigenous woman, a storyline that let the series foreground Indigenous characters and perspectives more directly than the source novels do. 

Season one premiered in December 2022, with an unusual weekly release for Prime Video that extended it until December 23, a finale that even left Gamache’s life on a cliffhanger. That’s because production company Left Bank Pictures, the studio behind The Crown, partnered with Sony Pictures Television on the series, and both wanted a second season. Three Pines also reached number one on Prime Video in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and its future seemed assured. Shockingly, Prime Video announced the cancellation in March 2023, with showrunner Emilia di Girolamo stating that Left Bank, Sony, and the streamer were simply unable to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.

3) Tales from the Loop

Prime Video’s Tales from the Loop was a genuinely unique sci-fi series, which ultimately worked against it. Developed by Nathaniel Halpern and based on Simon Stålenhag’s narrative art book, the anthology series adapted the Swedish artist’s paintings of unexplained retro-futuristic technology into eight interconnected episodes set in the fictional town of Mercer, Ohio. The series’ team pushed the visual effects to preserve the “painterly feeling” of Stålenhag’s original artwork rather than defaulting to conventional CGI polish, an approach that earned the show an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Supporting Role. 

All eight episodes of Tales from the Loop were released in April 2020 to positive reviews, with critics specifically praising how it transposed still paintings into moving images. However, even positive reviews underlined how Tales from the Loop burned too slowly, with a deliberate pacing that became a sticking point when it came to sustaining an audience. Amazon never ordered a second season, closing the book on an ambitious series that deserved a second season to polish its structure.

2) Paper Girls

Paper Girls premiered to critical and audience acclaim, but still couldn’t survive a marketing environment stacked against it. Adapted from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s Eisner Award-winning Image Comics series, the show follows four 1988 newspaper delivery girls — played by Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky, Camryn Jones, and Fina Strazza — after they’re pulled into a war between rival factions of time travelers. All eight episodes of the first season premiered in July 2022, arriving just as Amazon was funneling its promotional budget into The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

While most people who watched Paper Girls liked the series, the shows never never cracked Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings, and Amazon canceled it in September 2022, a little over a month after its debut. Legendary Television announced it would shop the series to other networks in hopes of continuing the story elsewhere, but no new home ever materialized.

1) The Peripheral

Developed by Scott B. Smith from William Gibson’s 2014 novel, The Peripheral starred Chloë Grace Moretz as Flynne Fisher, a woman who discovers a neural link connecting her to a technologically advanced future timeline. Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy executive produced the show as the first release under their overall deal with Amazon, reportedly worth $150 million, and the first season’s production budget ran north of $140 million for eight episodes. Those numbers underline how much Prime Video believed in the potential of the series to build a solid sci-fi franchise.

All episodes of The Peripheral were released in October 2022. The show received critical approval too, currently holding a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while audience approval is 85%. So, as expected, Amazon renewed the series for a second season. Unfortunately, the company reversed that decision in August 2023, citing the extended production delays caused by the concurrent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. That turned a show built around one of science fiction’s most influential authors into Prime Video’s most expensive unfinished story.

Which unfairly cancelled Prime Video series do you most wish had gotten a second season? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

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