Prime Video’s 6-Part Sci-Fi Show Is So Good, It Was Renewed For 3 Seasons After It Got Canceled

There is a six-season sci-fi TV show on Prime Video that was once canceled but was brought back after the streamer saw how great a property it was. In the long, depressing lineage of beloved shows that have been canceled too soon, there are a few bright spots, examples brought back from the brink.

Family Guy was famously revived after favorable DVD sales convinced Fox to renew the animated show for a fourth season. Remington Steele was briefly canceled at the end of the 1985-1986 season, only for producers to regain interest after lead actor Pierce Brosnan was offered the role of James Bond. The Wire was nearly canceled before season 4.

Add The Expanse to the list of great TV shows that looked like they were headed for the trash heap and ended up being rescued at the last second. The Expanse debuted on the Syfy network in December 2015 and ran for three seasons, the last of which ended in June 2018.

After those first three seasons, Syfy canceled the show, despite growing critical acclaim and a fervent audience base. These fans, who called themselves “Screaming Firehawks” after a ship in The Expanse, conducted a massive fan campaign to get the show greenlit on another streamer.

Over 100,000 fans signed a petition on Change.org to get the show back, and notable viewers like Patton Oswalt and George R.R. Martin expressed their hopes that the series would be renewed. Their prayers were answered by Amazon Prime, which put the show back on in 2019 for three more incredible seasons.

What The Expanse Does Better Than Other Sci-Fi TV Shows

The Expanse is based on a series of novels from James S.A. Corey set in a future where humanity has colonized most of the Solar System. Humanity has coalesced into three powers: the United Nations of Earth and Luna, the Martian Congressional Republic on Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance, which is the most loosely organized confederation.

The series stars United Nations Security Council member Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a bitter detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), and James Holden (Steven Strait), a ship’s officer, who together stumble upon an alien conspiracy that threatens to end the tenuous peace between these space-faring empires.

The Expanse builds slowly through all six seasons of the show, but still has enough juice every episode to keep viewers invested. The series effortlessly blends classic sci-fi tropes with detective noir fiction to make something that looks totally alien from the amazing visuals but feels incredibly human in its storytelling.

It’s a sci-fi show with an incredible sense of scale, and it makes time for politics, poverty, and ideas of oppression and discrimination. These are ideas that permeate all sci-fi, but The Expanse doesn’t just gesture towards them; it infuses the grim and thrilling storylines with these prescient topics.

The Expanse refuses to just be a story about the “final frontier”. It recognizes that just because humanity evolves technologically, it doesn’t mean that we are able to easily overcome the more primitive ideas and proclivities that hold us back, making for a richer series than we often see.

Release Date

2015 – 2022-00-00

Network

SyFy, Prime Video

Showrunner

Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby

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  Dominique Tipper

  Naomi Nagata

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