The Boroughs earned 9.5 million views in its first full week on Netflix. Then it was canceled anyway.
The sci-fi drama, produced by Stranger Things duo Matt and Ross Duffer and created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, was canceled after its first season despite opening to strong numbers. A third-week drop to 3.7 million views appeared to signal trouble ahead, according to Collider, even as the show was drawing positive reviews and reports had surfaced that a second-season writers' room had already been opened.
The show starred Geena Davis, Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Denis O'Hare, and Clarke Peters as retirees living in a retirement village who discover the owners are using the community as a front to drain residents of their brain fluid and feed it to a creature that keeps the owners young. The season finale, titled "Triple Audible," resolved that storyline.
Davis told The Hollywood Reporter that the cast found out from the producers before the cancellation was publicly announced, but received no explanation from Netflix.
"Fortunately, the producers, who became our dear, dear friends, were able to tell us before the news came out, and we're all terribly disappointed. Honestly, I don't know what happened. I think it's probably rare for a show to not get picked up and to have it announced that it's not being picked up while it's still in the top 10."
Davis said the show's complete first-season arc made the cancellation feel different than it might have otherwise.
"We didn't expect that," she said. "But the creators told us from the beginning that the series was not going to have a cliffhanger ending to the first season, that someone had advised them, 'Make it its own thing. And if you come back to do another year, make that its own thing.' And we really did. There's a tiny hint at the end that maybe everything isn't fixed, but it is a complete story. And if we had made it as a limited series, then it would've been a big hit and everybody would be happy."
Davis said she knew the role was right for her the moment she read the script. The character, Renee, is a former music manager.
"I was like, 'This is crazy how perfect this is for me,'" Davis said. "And then when I met with them, and I said that, they said, 'Well, we wrote it with you in mind, hoping you would say yes.'"
The show premiered on May 21 and remains available for streaming. It is still eligible for consideration in this season's Emmy race in the drama series categories.
Meanwhile, fans looking for something to fill the void have landed on an unlikely substitute. Co-star Alfred Molina's 2001 Western Texas Rangers has surfaced as one of the ten most-streamed movies on Paramount+. The film earned a 2% score on Rotten Tomatoes when it was released and made just $600,000 at the box office against a reported $38 million production budget. Twenty-five years later, it is a streaming hit.
