The third season of Syfy’s sci-fi series “The Expanse” only kicked off a month ago, but the network has announced today that the currently-airing season will be the last. The last episode of the series will air on Syfy this coming July.
But that’s the bad news.
The good news? Deadline reports that Alcon Television Group, which fully finances and produces the critically praised series, plans to shop it to other buyers.
They add, “The cancellation decision by Syfy is said to be linked to the nature of its agreement for the series, which only gives the cable network first-run linear rights in the US. That puts an extraordinary amount of emphasis on live, linear viewing which is inherently challenging for sci-fi/genre series which tend to draw the lion share of their audiences from digital/streaming.”
“We respect Syfy’s decision to end this partnership but given the commercial and critical success of the show, we fully plan to pursue other opportunities for this terrific and original IP,” Alcon Entertainment co-founders and co-CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson said of the well-reviewed series.
Co-created and written by Oscar-nominated screenwriting duo Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Children of Men), the series is based on the bestselling book series by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (under the pen name James S. A. Corey).
The cast includes Steven Strait, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Dominique Tipper, Cas Anvar, Wes Chatham, Frankie Adams and Thomas Jane.