Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 8, 2026
The second season of HBO Max’s The Pitt, my favorite show of 2025, premieres tonight. Ahead of that premiere, HBO Max has smartly renewed it for a third season. This show feels like it could run for a decade, as long as it maintains its intensity, keeps us invested in the characters, and avoids unnecessary story or casting stunts. I could not be more excited.
Elsewhere, I barely know anyone outside of my online circles who watched — or even heard of — FX’s fantastic The Lowdown< from Sterlin Harjo. Even Tori’s weekly coverage didn’t draw much traffic, but when something is good, you stick with it and hope the audience eventually finds it. That’s exactly what John Landgraf at FX has done by renewing The Lowdown for another season, which came as a huge surprise to me. The Ethan Hawke-starring series is fantastic, and I hope it finds a wider audience. Disney just needs to put a little more muscle behind it.
Then there’s Bill Maher’s Real Time, which HBO Max inexplicably continues to renew. I assume the ratings must still be there. After all, John Stamos is a huge fan and gets all of his political talking points from Maher. Ahem. The network has renewed it for a couple more seasons, guaranteeing a run through 2028. I hope Real Time — and a lot of other things — end their runs then.
People love Emily in Paris. I’ve never watched it, but I understand the appeal: it’s about as far removed from reality as possible, and there’s comfort in that. The series has been picked up for a sixth season, just a couple of weeks after the fifth season dropped. With the end of Stranger Things, I suspect that Emily in Paris (along with Virgin River) is among the longest-running scripted series currently on the streamer.
Apple TV+, meanwhile, has canned The Last Frontier after one season. I’m a little surprised, since it regularly appeared among the service’s Top 10, and Apple TV+ rarely cancels anything after a single season. I suspect it must have been very expensive. It was also bad. I can watch almost anything (see: every Harlan Coben series), but I couldn’t push through this one and bailed midway through.
Finally, it happened last month, but we haven’t mentioned it yet: Netflix canceled Boots, which is a real shame. It turned out to be a terrific series that never found the audience it deserved.
