Paramount+ Cancels Series After Just Two Seasons

Paramount+ has cancelled Joe Pickett after just two seasons. The series was originally released on Charter Communications’ Spectrum Originals in 2021 and Spectrum announced a second season of the series in February 2022. However, in July of 2022 Charter announced it was shutting down Spectrum Originals and with Joe Pickett being produced by Paramount Television Studios, the series moved to Paramount+ in June 2023. According to Variety, there are no plans to remove the series from Paramount+ at this time.

Based on the Joe Pickett novels by C.J. Box, the series followed the titular character Joe Pickett (played by Michael Dorman), a Wyoming game warden as he investigated cases in the town of Sattlestring and the surrounding wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. In addition to Dorman, the series starred Julianna Guill, Sharon Lawrence, Paul Sparks, Mustafa Speaks, Keean Johnson, and David Alan Grier. The series was created by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle who also served as directors, executive producers, and showrunners. Dough Wick and Lucy Fisher served as executive producers through Red Wagon Entertainment.

Paramount+ Recently Cancelled Two Other Series

Joe Pickett isn’t the only series that Paramount+ has recently cancelled. Last week the streaming service announced that both Rabbit Hole and Fatal Attraction were being cancelled after a single season each. Rabbit Hole was a thriller starring Keifer Sutherland that debuted back in March while Fatal Attraction starred Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson and was a reimagining of the film that starred Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. It premiered in April.

“Fatal Attraction and Rabbit Hole will not be returning for second seasons on Paramount+,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We want to thank both series’ entire creative teams, crews and the fantastic casts for their dedication to bringing these series to life. Both Fatal Attraction and Rabbit Hole will continue to be available on Paramount+ for audiences to discover.”

Sutherland had previously spoken about how tricky it could be to determine a show’s success and longevity on a streaming service when it came to Rabbit Hole’s potential future.

“It’s so weird now because I did ten years on 24, and I did three years of Designated Survivor, two years of Touch, and those were all network-based shows – at least Designated Survivor ’til the final year, then it was Netflix,” he said. “With the networks, there was a relationship somehow that would get developed pretty quickly and you would know. You would get a sense it would be leaning one way or another, and you would pretty much know as you were finishing up your season what was going to happen.”

“With the streaming services – with Paramount+ and my experience with Netflix, and I have to believe with all of them because I’ve heard this from other actors and writers as well – there’s kind of a wall between the group that makes whatever the programming is and the people that actually program it, and I don’t know why, but Nielsen’s not publishing the ratings for these shows particularly,” the actor continued. “And so there’s a lot of counting and figuring that’s going on that really you’re not involved with at all. It’s just changed. So it is very odd to not have a sense of where they stand with it.”