Nancy Drew has been running on The CW for 4 years. That’s coming to a swift end, basically out of nowhere, and of the show’s key producers is not at all happy.
The CW was acquired by a company called Nexstar recently, and it seems like they have a very different approach to how to run the network. The CW was well-known for almost never canceling shows, even if they weren’t enormous hits in the ratings. They’d sell them off to Netflix, after creating the shows with the help of their owners, Paramount and Warner Bros. Now that The CW has been separated from those studios — which both have their own streaming services anyway (Paramount+ and Max, respectively), the channel’s business model has drastically changed.
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The first few shows canceled by Nexstar were given an ample amount of time to wrap up. This included things like the reboot of Charmed and Legacies. On the other hand, shows like Nancy Drew had absolutely no time to prepare for the end. Instead, they were told about 3/4 of the way through their fourth season, meaning that they’ll have to turn their season finale into a finale for the whole show.
Larry Teng, who worked on Nancy Drew as both an executive producer and a director, posted a lengthy thread on Twitter, where he laid out the story behind the Nancy Drew series finale. As he put it, “imagine if you watched the finale without us knowing it would be the last episode of Nancy Drew ever. Because that’s what almost happened.”
He added that they only learned the show was canceled because its star Kennedy McMann, had landed a role on another series, and they were trying to figure out how to schedule everything — at which point the CW told them “Oh we’re not picking you up … the show is too expensive.” At that point the writers were already writing the season finale, which became the series finale.
“What a f—ing s—y way of telling us we were getting canceled … I’ve been pissed at the upper brass of this new CW since November. They suck,” Teng added.
You can read Teng’s full thread below…
