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A year ago, NBC canceled five scripted series in one day (and later a sixth) to help clear space on its schedule for primetime NBA games. Fox and CBS also axed six shows last year, including one pre-announced series end, and ABC dropped two shows.
In raw numbers, the 20 canceled shows last year were the most for the big four networks since 2022. In terms of percentage of scripted series canceled or ended (34.5 percent), it was the highest since 2020. It was easy to look at that, along with a much longer-term trend of declines in the total number of scripted series and ever-larger footprints for live sports, and predict the imminent demise of the network comedy and drama.
That demise might not be quite as imminent now.
While the networks ordered about the same number of new series this year (11) as they did in 2025 (12), cancellation numbers went way down — from 20 to just six, as of publication time. (One show, NBC’s second-year drama The Hunting Party, is still in limbo, and Fox’s miniseries The Faithful isn’t included in the cancellation number.) The result: There will be 55 scripted series on the big four in the 2026-27 season — one more on each network than there were in 2025-26 — with a small chance that a renewal for The Hunting Party could bump the total up to 56.
