Prime Video canceled its most-nominated show on the way to the Emmys

The week they canceled the good one

Prime Video canceled Spider-Noir. Nicolas Cage's first real TV job, eight episodes, a 92 on Rotten Tomatoes, ninety percent of the audience on board, and eleven Emmy nominations — more than any other show Prime put out this year — and they shot it in the parking lot. They announced the cancellation, per Variety, heading into the first weekend of the Emmys. You're up for eleven trophies and your own studio publishes the obituary on the walk to the ceremony. The stated reason is that the show did fine numbers but cost a fortune, partly because somebody decided to shoot every episode twice, once in color and once in black-and-white, because Nicolas Cage as a 1930s detective apparently needed to be available in two finishes, like a kitchen faucet. So the most decorated thing on the platform gets the bullet, and somewhere a Prime executive is greenlighting a sixth cooking competition because the spreadsheet says noir doesn't scale. Nothing good is allowed to be expensive. Everything cheap gets renewed forever.

The Drops

DANG! (Netflix)

Adult animated comedy about a brother and sister living out their messy twenties in New York until their worst nightmare arrives: their high-achieving older sister wants to hang out with them. Stephanie Hsu and Poppy Liu are in it, Andrew Law created and voices it, and Mike Schur, the Parks and Rec and Good Place guy, is an EP, with Titmouse handling the animation. Eight episodes, half an hour each. That's a genuine lineup of people who know how a joke is built, so I'll give it a real look before I decide it's another cartoon the algorithm ordered to sit next to the fourteen it already has. The bar is low and the pedigree is high. Worth the audition.

✅ WORTH IT

Colisión (HBO Max)

HBO Max made a telenovela. Its first original one in Spanish, produced by Telemundo, and good for them, because the telenovela is a machine that actually works, which is more than you can say for most of what gets greenlit above it. Macarena Achaga plays a woman who comes home to Mexico after her father dies to take over the family business, only to find that her mother, played by Margarita Rosa de Francisco, already grabbed it and has no intention of handing it back. Four episodes this week, then five a week until late October. If your grandmother had HBO Max she'd already be three deep and yelling at Belén through the screen. Respect the form.

🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Last Seen (Apple TV+)

Another missing-daughter thriller, this one Australian. Patrick Brammall plays a detective whose kid vanished eleven years ago and who now works as a police dispatcher, fielding other people's emergencies while quietly refusing to accept his own case is closed. Adapted from Ryan David Jahn's novel The Dispatcher, with Maxine Peake in the cast, and Peake is the detail that made me look twice — she doesn't turn up for nothing. Six episodes, two out of the gate on Wednesday, then weekly through early October. Apple's whole personality is a sad competent person in gray weather solving one crime very slowly, and this fits the shelf perfectly. Silo just left a hole. Here's your gray.

✅ WORTH IT

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Season 5 (Hulu)

The MomTok show is back, and this is the grim entry to write up. Production paused this year during a domestic-violence investigation involving star Taylor Frankie Paul, per Variety, and the season came out the other side cut from ten episodes to five. So the fallout of a real investigation becomes a five-episode Hulu drop, and Hulu, having read every word of that situation, has already ordered twenty more episodes through Season 7. The tragedy is a tragedy. The renewal is a business plan. Five episodes, all Thursday. I won't tell you it's good. I'll tell you somebody in a boardroom looked at that and saw a slate.

🐍 SLOP

Pick of the Week

Call My Agent! The Movie on Netflix. The French series it grew out of, Dix Pour Cent, is the best show anybody's made about talent agents — four seasons of a Paris agency lying beautifully to actors playing heightened versions of themselves. The movie reunites the ASK crew five years on, with Andréa now directing her first feature and losing her lead days before the shoot, and it drags in George Clooney, Eva Longoria and Laetitia Casta to play themselves. I haven't seen it. Don't care. The series banked enough goodwill that I'll watch the reunion on faith, which is more than the entire American industry will extend to a show holding eleven Emmy nominations, apparently.

Closer

Programming note. The most-nominated show on Prime is dead, Mike Schur is in the cartoon business, HBO discovered the telenovela roughly forty years after Univision did, and Apple has once again located a sad man near a body of water. If you want the thing that's actually good this week, it's French and it's about a talent agency, which tells you everything about the state of the shop. See you next week, assuming Prime hasn't canceled that too.