You know the drill by now; a popular streaming series gets canceled, and before the dust has even settled a campaign arises in an effort to convince somebody somewhere that a project deemed not good enough for one platform is perfect for another, although any backing for The Peripheral is surely doomed to fail.
While fans will no doubt be emboldened by the fate of Warrior Nun – which is returning for an entire trilogy of movies after being booted off the airwaves by Netflix – Prime Video’s sci-fi saga is an altogether different matter. For one thing, it was already renewed for a second season before the axe came down, and then there’s the price tag.
For eight episodes of television, Amazon’s on-demand service is estimated to have sunk $175 million into the production, which isn’t an investment anybody will be willing to make when you consider the raft of cancellations to have afflicted every major player in the streaming wars. If something like Disney Plus is happy to ensure a $100+ million series can’t be watched anywhere six months after it debuts, then what chance does The Peripheral have of Netflix, Apple TV, Peacock, or any of the rest stepping in?
Not that it’ll do a thing to stop #SaveThePeripheral from gaining traction on social media, but it wasn’t even what you’d call a mainstream show, either. The reviews may have been solid and the viewing figures were strong enough for Prime Video to initially take a chance on another run, but it hardly captured the zeitgeist in the same way the biggest shows on TV do, and that includes the recently-revived Warrior Nun.