I've talked here before about streaming shows getting eliminated, and this week we had another casualty. Paramount Plus announced that Star Trek: Prodigy, its animated kids' show set in the Trek universe's Delta Quadrant, would be cancelled and removed from the streaming service during the final week of June 2023. Apparently this isn't the first time an exclusive of theirs has disappeared, since they did the same thing with Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot that had aired on CBS All-Access.
The last time I wrote about this, I suggested catching something you've been putting off, because who knew what would happen to it? I suppose I didn't expect it to happen so quickly, with another show that's relevant to my interests. The only problem is, when the news came down a couple of days ago, I knew that I wouldn't have time to watch all of Prodigy's 20 episodes before they disappeared.
It's disappointing because, again, you'd hope that streamers' original shows would be protected from this sort of thing, but it turns out that even hosting your own shows costs a lot of money. Presumably, the execs at Paramount saw that Prodigy (along with the other three shows that are getting axed) wasn't getting enough views, but I'm surprised at that, since I've heard a lot of good stuff about the show from other fans. I'd also watched the first few episodes on a plane last year, and had been looking forward to catching up with the rest of it when I could.
Once again, I have to bemoan the move away from DVD releases of shows in recent years. Apparently, Prodigy only got a DVD release of its first 10 episodes, and there don't seem to be imminent plans to release the others. I've also been watching Fargo on DVD from Netflix (RIP, come September), but as I finish the third season I won't be able to continue with it, since there was never a physical media release of Season 4. It seemed sensible a few years ago, when streaming got pretty good, to abandon physical formats, but now it just means shows and movies are disappearing completely.
One thought that occurs to me is whether this spate of cancellations is related to the ongoing writers' strike in Hollywood. Work has stopped on pretty much all scripted shows, apart from (presumably) the ones that were already written and filmed (since SAG-AFTRA is also joining in), so a lot of shows are probably on the edge of cancellation the longer the strike goes on.
This shouldn't be taken as a complaint about the strike, btw. I'm fully in favor of writers, actors, directors, and all creatives getting paid fairly for their work, and not being supplanted by AI (see the titles of Disney Plus's Secret Invasion, which were created with generative AI and kicked off a bit of a controversy this past week). I suspect that studios are cutting back more and more because the strike doesn't seem close to resolution, which means they'll be expecting worse revenues this year; while on the other hand, and kinda cynically, they've been seeing what happened when HBO/Discovery took the axe to a bunch of originals and since nothing too bad happened, in terms of subscribers, and so now the other streamers and studios are doing it too.
I don't know how Prodigy's production on Season 2 was affected by the strikes, since animation writers aren't covered by the WGA, though presumably its voice actors are all part of SAG-AFTRA. That said, the show didn't need to be doing so badly on its own to get canned, if cutting it meant Paramount could save money elsewhere, on some other executives' pet projects.
My only hope is that its second season does get picked up somewhere, so that, if nothing else, the creators get to finish their story and the fans get to watch it. For my own part, maybe it's time I invest in the DVD box sets of the various older Trek shows...
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