The Orville and 8 other genre shows we’re afraid will be cancelled in 2023

Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler

Okay, so those are some of the shows we fear may not be renewed but that we want to get renewed. There are other series that may fade into obscurity without us really noticing or caring. For instance, take Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler, which aired its third season this year armed with ambition, grit and an extremely unwieldy subtitle. The show isn’t terrible, but it’s hard to make a dent in the already-enormous-and-ever-expanding Batman cinematic universe. We haven’t heard whether Pennyworth is coming back for a fourth season, and we can’t say we’re loosing any sleep wondering.

That said, showrunner Bruno Heller knows what he would do with a fourth season were it to happen. As he told ComicBook.com:

"It would have to be slightly more bonkers. We’ve got to keep up that arc. It’s leading to a world in which people like Batman and the Joker exist so it was always the intention to kind of keep upping the ante on the craziness of this world as long as it keeps a grounding in real life, which is where Jack Bannon and Alfred come in, because he’s such a regular person. The world will get stranger and crazier as it goes on."

Sure, why not?

Avenue 5

Avenue 5 is a sci-fi comedy from the mind of Armando Iannucci, the guy behind Veep. Toss in actors like Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad and it sounds like a winning formula, but the first season was…much limper and more aimless than you’d expect given the talent involved. The second season has been better received, at least by critics. It’s hard to know what audiences thought, because barely anyone watched it. Season 2 came and went on HBO with hardly any promotion, not a great sign that the show has a long life ahead of it.

That said, Iannucci told Entertainment Weekly that he’d love to keep the show going. “[E]veryone wants to do more. HBO are very keen. We’ll make more when we can corral everyone together again. Everyone’s up for it and we’ve already got ideas and thoughts about what happens next.”

I’m glad the series is improving, but the show may have missed the boat.

La Brea

La Brea is an NBC show about a fissure that opens in the ground. A mother and son fall through and find themselves in a primeval world. On the surface, the husband and daughter must figure out what’s going on.

La Brea has been chugging along for a season-and-a-half at this point, making some minor waves, gaining some fans, and generally making critics roll their eyes. There’s another block of seven episodes coming in the new year, so it’s not in immediate danger of cancellation, but whether there’ll be appetite for any more after that is very much an open question.

The Terror

The last season of The Terror, a horror anthology show with a historical bent, aired on AMC in 2019, a few years gone. We’ve heard little since, so it looks like this show is dead, but there’s just enough hope left that I feel I should include it on the list.

Per Deadline, in January 2020, AMC president Sarah Barnett expressed interest in renewing The Terror for a third season and that AMC and Scott Free Productions were discussing plot ideas. Now, either they discussed those plot ideas and then AMC rejected them, or they’ve been discussing them for a very long time, because we still don’t have a renewal order. The odds aren’t looking good.

And that would probably be okay. The first season of The Terror, about an arctic expedition gone wrong, was based on Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel of the same name. It was very tense and exciting. The second season was set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. It was ambitious, but didn’t hold together as well. AMC may have had enough.