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Q: Have "Zoo" and "The Last Ship" been canceled?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

Yes and … sort of.

It's all bad news for "Zoo," which got the axe last fall after three increasingly unsuccessful seasons on CBS.

The bad news for "The Last Ship" is that TNT canceled it in May, but the good news is it still has an entire season in the hopper that the cable channel will air later this year.

The upcoming final season of "The Last Ship" will be its fifth, which is a pretty respectable run for any TV show. And the producers and cast seem to have been told ahead of time that it would be canceled, which is a bit of extra good news for viewers.

I say they "seem" to have been told because when shooting finished on the fifth season last fall (months before the cancellation announcement), series co-star Travis Van Winkle posted on Instagram that it was a "series wrap." The producers made him take down the post shortly afterward.

The reason this is good news is because it means the show won't end in a cliffhanger -- season 5 will finally provide some resolution to the sci-fi plot of a mysterious plague wiping out humanity. There's a little less intrigue about the end of "Zoo." The show started strong in the ratings (well, as strong as a summer show can be -- they never do as well as fall and winter shows), but it dropped pretty steadily from there. And it was pretty expensive to make -- networks rarely do scripted shows over the summer because they're pricier than reality TV shows and, again, they're competing for smaller audiences.

There's even a tiny bit of good news here, though: one of the reasons CBS went ahead on an expensive show in the summer is because it cut a deal with Netflix ahead of time to allow the streaming service to offer each season shortly after it aired on CBS. That means what there is of "Zoo" can still be found online. And its off-the-wall plot about animals going mad makes it pretty rewatchable.

 

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