Prime Video Just Pulled the Plug on Outer Range, and It’s a Shame

It’s not every day that a major streaming service takes the risk of offering a sci-fi-meets-neo-Western mashup that puts Josh Brolin in a cowboy hat and ponders big existential questions like the nature of time. For better or worse, that’s what you got with Prime Video. Outdoor rangeone of several ambitious and creative series from the Amazon streamer that deserved far more attention than they got — and were just canceled after two widely well-received seasons.

Prime Video doesn’t release viewership figures for its shows, so it’s hard to know how much audience size played a role in the cancellation. At the same time, Prime’s decision is more than surprising, considering the show has an average rating of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes for both seasons. Nielsen data also shows that the show has performed quite well; within a week of its release, it climbed to No. 3 on the top 10 streaming originals.

This does not change the fact that fans of Outdoor range Like me, we are crushed by the cancellation, which is becoming more and more of a habit on Prime. I can actually think of several shows that were abruptly canceled, including Night sky And Peripheralas well as Outdoor range — which boasted a fantastic cast and a top-notch overall story and production despite Amazon’s premature withdrawal. And left fans with cliffhangers on all three, to top it all off.

I suspect that the Outdoor range The news, in particular, will accelerate a trend already prevalent among streaming audiences, in which viewers are increasingly waiting until all the episodes of a season have been released — and perhaps even renewed — before they take the time to binge it. Which, of course, doesn’t exactly help matters, since a show needs so much support in progress the largest possible audience to promote its prospects for renewal.

Brolin directed Outdoor rangeThe series also stars Imogen Poots, Lili Taylor, Tom Pelphrey, Noah Reid, and Will Patton. I don’t regret getting involved in the story, but it’s a shame we don’t get to see more of Autumn and her quest, the Tillerson family drama, and Brolin’s rancher, Royal Abbott. It just goes to show that there are few places where a trippy streaming drama like this is allowed to thrive, outside of Apple TV+ as a giant exception.