“Eyewitness” has been canceled after one season at USA Network, Variety has confirmed.
The crime thriller hailed from “Shades of Blue” creator Adi Hasak, and starred Julianne Nicholson.
The drama, which debuted in Oct. 2016, failed to garner an audience over its first 10 episodes. In Nielsen’s Live+Same Day ratings, its season average was a 0.17 in the 18-49 demographic and 639,000 total viewers.
Based on the Norwegian series, “Eyewitness” explored a grisly crime from the point of view of the eyewitnesses, following two innocent teenage boys who secretly meet up in the forest and witness a shooting and barely escape with their lives.
Hasak acquired the rights to the Norwegian property, brought the format to Universal Cable Productions, which produced the show, and quickly nabbed a straight-to-series order. He served as writer, exec producer and showrunner on the series. Jarl Emsell Larsen also served as executive producer.
At the time of the “Eyewitness” premiere, Hasak explained to Variety what about the story intrigued him enough to shepherd the project along himself: “It was a thriller that told you who the bad guy was five minutes into it,” he said. “That meant it could be a character piece. I was raised on ‘Columbo.’ I thought those storylines were great.”
In her review, published before the series debuted, Variety critic Maureen Ryan praised the drama for it’s “interesting thread” involving a gay couple that becomes involved in the series’ central crime. She wrote, “The time spent on this textured and sometimes turbulent relationship, which is sensitively portrayed, gives ‘Eyewitness’ a fresh angle on its small-town crime story, which is somewhat familiar in a number of other respects.”
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