KSiteTV has learned that ABC summer drama Mistresses has been cancelled after four seasons of bed hopping, wine drinking, and crazy plot twists. The fourth season finale, which aired this past Tuesday, now serves as the show’s series finale.
In some ways, it’s a miracle that Mistresses made it as far as it did, as the show has seen regular cast turnover and production location changes throughout its four seasons. Series regular Alyssa Milano left after two seasons due to the show moving production to Vancouver in a bid to cut costs, while the likes of Jason George, Yunjin Kim, and Jennifer Esposito were also written out of their own series regular roles. Though the show held fairly steady this season in the ratings in season four, its finale dead even with the finale of season three, said ratings came with a much stronger lead-in that the show couldn’t take advantage of. Given that it’s a serialized drama in its fourth season, it’s understandable that it couldn’t draft off of the success of The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, but the show’s inability to beef up its numbers coming in a time when ABC found success with cheap game shows likely proved to be its undoing. Simply put, ABC’s summer scripted presence has declined by quite a bit in recent years and since they were never able to get much of a foothold with scripted audiences anyway, they’ve decided to embrace unscripted content that targets a wide audience.
The cancellation of Mistresses comes less than two weeks following the cancellation of fellow summer soap Devious Maids, another project that focused on the friendship between four women of a certain age. Not only are nighttime soaps seemingly on the way out thanks to prestige chasing and a general gloominess to all the recent network rebrands, there’s suddenly a real (and worrisome) paucity of shows about female friendship. Serialized dramas led by adult women tend to be shows that are focused on some combination of their relationship to a man (e.g. Scandal), stockpiled twists that can threaten characterization (e.g. UnREAL, How to Get Away with Murder), or some type of supernatural/intense element that make it “okay” for men to watch (e.g. American Horror Story, Homeland); shows that are okay with female vulnerability and secure enough to allow female main characters to bond are becoming rarer, as are shows that possess ensembles primarily made up of women in their 30s and 40s.
Additionally, with Mistresses and Beauty and the Beast meeting their makers this summer, the only original broadcast scripted content guaranteed to air next summer is wacky CBS drama Zoo, which has already been renewed for a third season. Fellow CBS dramas American Gothic and BrainDead, as well as FOX anthology Wayward Pines, currently remain in limbo.
Based on the British series of the same name and adapted for American television by K.J. Steinberg (Gossip Girl), Mistresses told the story of four female friends and the personal and professional difficulties the foursome faced. The fourth and final season of the series starred Jes Macallan (The Mentor), Rochelle Aytes (White Chicks), Yunjin Kim (Lost), Rob Mayes (The Client List), and Brett Tucker (Neighbours).
Will you miss Mistresses? Do you think the show should have been renewed for a fifth season? Are you okay with the broadcast networks backing away from scripted programming in the summer?
