Renewals and Cancellations: 'Fallout,' 'Elsbeth,' 'For All Mankind,' 'The Witcher'

Good news! This week, Renewals and Cancellations is all renewals. To no one’s surprise, Amazon has renewed Fallout for a second season. I don’t think we have official numbers from anyone yet, but it’s been huge. It’s so huge that people who don’t play video games and otherwise had no interest in the series have watched it all the way through and loved it. Walton Goggins is magic.

Likewise, CBS has renewed Elsbeth for a second season only a few episodes into its first season. For good reason. It’s doing great numbers, the critics love it, and it’s weirdly a fun family show (for families with older kids). It has been a blast, and the guest star of the week and the quirky procedural of it all feels sort of throw-backy in the best possible sense. It also happens to be perfectly demographically tailored toward our readers here. Please don’t take that as an insult.

I also love For All Mankind, which Apple TV+ has renewed for a fifth season. Bonus: The streamer has also greenlit a spin-off series, Star City, which will go back to this alternative timeline and gander at how the Soviet Union beat the United States to the moon. The series will “explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.”

There’s one more renewal: Netflix is bringing back The Witcher for one last season, its fifth. I feel like the pandemic and the lead change sucked a lot of wind out of the show’s sails, but it’s still big for the streamer.

Earlier this week, ABC also picked up The Rookie for a seventh season. The television gods have been making amends to Nathan Fillion for canceling Firefly all those years back by giving him eight seasons of Castle and seven seasons (and counting) of The Rookie. Good for him (I also happen to really like The Rookie, although screw Tim for what he pulled with Lucy).

Meanwhile, there’s no official word on The Conners but it’s somehow up for a seventh season (what is time?). At the moment, however, that’s in limbo despite solid ratings, likely due to the costs of the series. The showrunners, meanwhile, have shot a possible ending to the series to add to the final episode this season should ABC decide not to pick it up. And before you cheer the demise of The Conners, note that if it’s dropped, it’s because ABC is likely to replace it with that Tim Allen/Kat Dennings comedy it’s developing.

The news is even more precarious for Not Dead Yet, a charming Gina Rodriguez series that I’ve become rather fond of. That series, however, is on the bubble and things reportedly don’t look great for it.

With those out of the way, here are a few dates to note: The third season of Apple TV+’s Acapulco premieres on May 1st. I still haven’t seen the first two seasons, but I’m going to at least sample it ahead of the third season because I have heard that it’s heartwarming and uplifting. I need that.

Sweet Tooth is returning to Netflix on June 6th with its third and final season (now with Kelly Marie Tran). This is another show that had a beloved first season but kind of fell by the wayside during the pandemic. I never bothered with the second season myself, and I suspect that was a mistake.

Finally, the beloved We Are Lady Parts about a Muslim punk band is finally returning for a second season on Peacock on May 30th. All six episodes will drop. It’s been three years since the first season premiered, which means the first season is obviously due for a rewatch next month. Get on that, y’all.