Celebrations all around as The Expanse has been saved! According to Deadline, Amazon has closed a deal to pick up the sci-fi drama series, which is in its third and final season on Syfy. The announcement was made by Amazon’s boss himself, Jeff Bezos, at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles where he was an honouree. It happened an hour or so after The Expanse panel at the same event that featured exec producer and showrunner Naren Shankar and cast members Cas Anvar, Wes Chatham and Steven Strait.
Amazon had been one of the main targets for the fans behind the #SaveTheExpanse campaign. Fans of the show launched a huge drive to get a streaming company to pick up The Expanse after Syfy decided not to renew the show for a fourth season a few weeks days ago. The last episodes are scheduled to air in early July.
The campaign has included a petition, which has collected over 138,000 signatures to date, and a GoFundMe page, which collected money for a #Save The Expanse banner to be flown over the Amazon headquarters last week.
Alcon Entertainment Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson said: “We couldn’t be more excited that The Expanse is going to continue on Amazon Prime! We are deeply grateful that Jeff Bezos, Jen Salke, and their team at Amazon have shown such faith in our show. We also want to thank Laura Lancaster, head of Alcon Television, for her tireless efforts. We are fully aware that this wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the staggering outpouring of support from the most creative, hardest working sci-fi fans around the world. From Reddit campaigns to aeroplanes, we say thank you. It worked!”
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. This puts a huge amount of emphasis on live, linear viewing, which is apparently challenging for sci-fi/genre series that tend to draw the lion’s share of their audiences from digital/streaming platforms.
Leave a Reply