Wicked City: Cancelled; ABC Drops Tuesday Night Drama After Three Episodes

It looks like we finally have the first cancellation of the 2015-16 season. Four new shows have seen their episode orders cut (Truth Be Told, The Player, Blood & Oil, and Minority Report) but they’ve all stayed on the air. Tonight, ABC cancelled and pulled their low-rated Wicked City anthology drama after three airings.

Wicked City is set on the seedy Sunset Strip in the early 1980s. It revolves around Detective Jack Roth (Jeremy Sisto) and his new partner Paco Contreras (Gabriel Luna) as they try to solve a high-profile serial killer case. The rest of the show’s cast includes Ed Westwick, Erika Christensen, Taissa Farmiga, Karolina Wydra, Evan Ross, Anne Winters, and Jaime Ray Newman.

Airing Tuesdays at 10pm, Wicked City had trouble right from the start. The first episode attracted a meager 0.88 rating in the 18-49 demographic with 3.28 million viewers.

The second episode dropped more than 20% and this week’s third installment took another big fall, registering a 0.45 rating with 1.69 million. The latter rating is believed to be a historic low for an original episode on ABC; tying shows like NBC’s American Odyssey, NBC’s A To Z, and FOX’s Mulaney.

The Tuesdays at 10pm timeslot has been a real troublespot for ABC in recent years. Lucky 7, Killer Women, and Mind Games were all cancelled after a few airings. Forever and Body of Proof saw full seasons but also ended up being cancelled.

Word is that work on episode eight will be completed before production is completely shut down. The network will fill Wicked City’s timeslot with reruns of Shark Tank for the immediate future.  At this point, it seems unlikely that ABC will air the five leftover episodes but they will probably be released online at some point.

What do you think? Do you like the Wicked City TV show? Do you think it should have been cancelled? Would you like to see the remaining episodes?