FX “Terriers” Cancelled

FX has pulled the plug on Terriers after the show’s first season attracted abyssmal ratings for the basic cable network, The Hollywood Reporter said Monday.

The FX conspiracy drama, which aired its finale last month, averaged only about 970,000 viewers per episode. Set in San Diego, Terriers followed a pair of private investigators and starred Logue, Michael Raymond-James, Laura Allen, Rockmond Dunbar, Jamie Denbo and Kimberly Quinn. The show was created by Shawn Ryan, the mastermind behind the network’s celebrated series The Shield.

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, FX President John Landgraf defended his network against complaints from Terriers fans accusing FX of failing to effectively promote the series.

“If I legitimately believed that the reason the show didn’t succeed on our air was that we felt we failed to adequately describe to the audience what the show was about, that would have been reason alone to renew it,” Landgraf said. “One of the reasons I spent a lot of money and had people spend a lot of time doing a postmortem analysis is because the question was: Was the marketing campaign fair to the show? There are plenty of people in Los Angeles who drove by various billboards and are always going to say ‘no,’ but the reality is they don’t understand the reality of how everyone else in America was presented this show. So from my standpoint, if we did market the show, how would I believe that putting the show on air would miraculously triple or quadruple ratings, which is what it would need to be to be successful?”

He added: “I just couldn’t find any way from a business standpoint or quantitatively how to do a second season of the show. And that’s really unfortunate because I love it, but that’s the reality.”