TERRA NOVA Cancelled by Fox and 3 Reasons the Show Failed

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Fox has cancelled Terra Nova, but the show may find a life on another network. Deadline reports that the show from producers Steven Spielberg and Peter Chernin will not have a second season. Jason O'Mara and Stephen Lang lead the cast of the show set 85 million years in the past. Despite the show's 259 practical sets and 16 months of post-production, it could not maintain an audience.

It seems as though Terra Nova was doomed from the very beginning. The pilot script was penned by Craig Silverstein and Kelly Marcel, but Silverstein was not able to stay with the project because his CW pilot Nikita was picked up to series. I noticed a change in tone from the pilot to the next few episodes, so this makes sense. The problems did not end there.

Brennan Braga was brought on to run the show, and then Rene Echevarria was hired to assist. The series went through 2 writing staffs and had issues with casting, which caused a delay in production that cost $660,000. The two-hour pilot had had a budget of $14 million, and it cost about $4 million for each subsequent episode. Fox marketed Terra Nova heavily, which helped the pilot do well. The show overall had modest ratings and did well on DVR. Terra Nova's two-hour season finale drew a 2.2/6 in adults 18-49 and 7.2 million viewers.

The pilot episode was really cool, but the remaining episodes did not hold my attention, and I stopped watching the series. It is a shame that such an expensive show could not draw an audience, but there are a few reasons why I feel that this show failed. 

  1. More Dinosaurs - Just like Christopher Walken needs more cowbell, Terra Nova needed to have more dinosaurs. 
  2. Poor Writing - The show was doomed when Silverstein could not come back to write the episodes after the pilot.
  3. Casting - While both O'Mara and Lang are fairly solid, they are not the best people to lead a cast. I also felt that the rest of the cast was awful, and I could never feel for them. 

 What do you think of the series being cancelled? Do you want to see this show end up on another network?

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