Stumptown Cancelled at ABC, as COVID-Related Delay Triggers Reversal of Season 2 Renewal
ABC won’t return to Stumptown, after all.
The network has cancelled the Cobie Smulders dramedy, despite renewing it for Season 2 in May, our sister site Deadline reports.
Per Deadline, the cancellation came after delays in starting production — related to the COVID-19 pandemic — meant that the show would not be ready to launch this fall. ABC had planned to return Stumptown to its Wednesdays-at-10/9c time slot.
ABC Signature, which produces the series, reportedly will shop the show to other networks and/or streaming sites.
Stumptown had recently made a change in leadership behind the scenes: Monica Owusu-Breen (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fringe) had boarded the show as its new co-showrunner alongside creator Jason Richman. She would have succeeded Matt Olmstead, who acted as co-showrunner in Season 1.
In the Season 1 finale, which aired March 25, an excited Ansel opened the front door to reveal his long-estranged mother, whose appearance stunned his big sister Dex. It was then that the episode cut to black, before the audience got a peek at Mama Parios.
In March, co-showrunner Jason Richman told TVLine that it was always the plan to end Season 1 with the arrival of Mama Parios. “It was sort of the big, core mystery, that Dex doesn’t know what happened [to her parents],” he said. “She came back from her time in Afghanistan and found her brother in a home and her parents missing, so she has carried this resentment about it for a long time.”
As for whether we would have met Papa Parios, Richman confirmed, “In the story that we’re going to tell in Season 2, Mom leads to Dad in a way that’s kind of circuitous… We needed Mom to show up first.”
The series is the latest of several recent renewal-reversals, including Comedy Central’s Drunk History and Tosh.0, TruTV’s I’m Sorry and Netflix’s The Society.
What do you think of Stumptown‘s recent turn of events? Would you watch it on another network? Hit the comments with your thoughts!
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