Timothy Olyphant’s Canceled Netflix Sci-Fi Show Is A Hidden Gem

With his back-to-back roles in Deadwood and Justified throughout the 2000s, Timothy Olyphant became one of the most prolific and iconic actors on television. He singlehandedly brought back the TV western, and he’s done a lot more since then. But Olyphant hasn’t had the best luck in the streaming era. He got a really promising debut as Tatooine sheriff Cobb Vanth in The Mandalorian on Disney+, but then he got relegated to the abysmal spinoff, The Book of Boba Fett.

In the past decade, Olyphant has starred in not one, but two underrated gems that have been canceled much too soon by Netflix. First, he starred alongside Drew Barrymore in Santa Clarita Diet, a brilliant horror comedy juxtaposing the mundanity of suburbia with the grisly terror of monsters and cannibalism. Santa Clarita Diet at least lasted three seasons; Olyphant’s next hidden gem on Netflix, Terminator Zero, was canceled after just one season.

In 2024, Terminator Zero brought the Terminator franchise to the small screen. It wasn’t the first Terminator TV show — that was The Sarah Connor Chronicles — but this was the first anime-style animated series, and it proved to be a treat. Every Terminator movie after T2 has been trying to recapture the blockbuster spectacle of James Cameron’s masterpiece, and it’s just not going to happen. Terminator Zero brought the saga to a whole different medium — and not only that, it moved the setting to Tokyo — so, for the first time in decades, the Terminator franchise felt exciting and new.

And then, as the streamer is wont to do, Netflix canceled it ahead of its time. Terminator Zero remains a worthwhile binge for sci-fi fans (and certainly for Terminator fans), but I just wish it had been allowed to go on a little longer before being, if you’ll pardon the pun, terminated.

Terminator Zero Is The Best Terminator Since T2

In the 35 years since Terminator 2 exploded into cinemas and became a global blockbuster success, Hollywood has been trying like hell to keep the franchise going. First, there was Terminator 3, bringing back Arnold Schwarzenegger to protect an older, less likable version of John Connor. Then, there was Terminator Salvation, which had the bright idea to do a whole movie of flash-forwards to the future war against the machines, but it neglected to tell the most interesting story and instead focused on a boring new character.

After Terminator Genisys, a sort of greatest-hits montage mashing together all the franchise’s best bits (and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen), Cameron came back to produce Terminator: Dark Fate, ignoring all those other movies and acting as a direct sequel to T2. But it ended up being maybe an even bigger disappointment than the last direct sequel to T2.

The universe is clearly trying to tell Hollywood that the Terminator franchise should’ve ended with T2, and that they need to stop trying to make it a thing. But Hollywood, God bless them, keeps trying — Cameron is working on Terminator 7 as we speak — and it does yield the occasional gem. There have been a couple of great comics and video games, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was an underappreciated cult classic, and then, of course, there’s Terminator Zero.

Terminator Zero is the best Terminator thing we’ve seen since Terminator 2. That’s not saying much, but it’s gorgeously animated, with a compelling neo-noir narrative and a star-studded voice cast including Olyphant as a T-800, Rosario Dawson as an anti-Skynet A.I., and Sonoya Mizuno as a resistance soldier. It harks back to classic Terminator mythology and iconography, but it’s completely its own thing. It feels as much like Blade Runner as it does The Terminator: a neon-drenched mystery.