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Lodge 49 will not open its doors again after all.
Efforts to find the critically praised-yet-canceled AMC drama have failed, per creator Jim Gavin, who shared the news Tuesday in a lengthy and heartfelt Twitter thread.
“It breaks my heart to announce that Lodge 49 won’t be going forward. We tried very hard to find a new home, but there were no takers. Ratings, metrics, algorithms … que sera, brah,” he wrote.
Gavin noted that he had hoped Lodge 49‘s place on multiple “best TV of 2019” critical lists would have given AMC second thoughts about its decision to cancel the low-rated drama starring Wyatt Russell: “Re: AMC … Mixed feelings! Even after our cancellation we made just about every major top ten list alongside all the big shows. That’s not easy to do and it makes me so proud. We delivered something special & I think it’s fair to say that we deserved a chance to finish our story.”
AMC canceled Lodge 49 on Oct. 29 after a two-season run. The series, about a guy adrift after his father’s passing who finds a family and sense of being among the fraternal lodge in Long Beach, California, averaged less than 500,000 total viewers with three days of delayed viewing.
Lodge 49 came in at No. 5 on The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg’s list of the top 10 shows of 2019. The show has a 93 percent rating among critics and 88 percent score among viewers on RottenTomatoes.com.
Producers including Gavin, showrunner Peter Ocko and executive producer Paul Giamatti tried to find a new home for the drama in the months that followed. That ended Tuesday.
Attempts to find a new home were always going to be challenging for Lodge 49. The series was owned and produced by AMC’s in-house studio, AMC Studios, which is not currently set up to be a content supplier to third-party outlets. Further complicating matters is the fact that the show wasn’t cheap to produce and already had a streaming deal in place with Hulu.
Gavin noted that Lodge 49‘s two seasons would debut on Hulu in 2020 and hoped the show’s loyal fans would “make a celebration of it.”
Read Gavin’s heartfelt thread here and listen to THR‘s Fienberg open up about the late and great show during the Nov. 1 episode of the TV’s Top 5 podcast here.
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