The (bad) news of WGN America's cancellation of "Outsiders" got a little lost in the bigger news of the network's sale (along with its parent company) a few months later in 2017. That might be why you didn't hear about it, and it might also be why it happened.

"Outsiders," a gritty drama about a clan living an isolationist, hardscrabble life in the Appalachian mountains, was WGN's highest-rated show, and so its cancellation came as a bit of a surprise.

However, in a bit of transparency that's too rare in the TV biz, Peter Kern, president of WGN's parent company (at the time) Tribune Media, explained the decision.

He said the company wanted to, "expand both the quantity and breadth of content aired by WGN America," and that, "to free up the resources to reach this goal, we will unfortunately not be renewing 'Outsiders.'"

That is to say, "Outsiders" was expensive, and the company had bigger plans. Those bigger plans turned out to be sale to a different company -- Sinclair. Deadline.com speculated that "Outsiders" was canceled to improve WGN's balance sheet ahead of the deal.

Once the sale had been announced, Sinclair boss Chris Ripley said, basically, that he agreed with the decision. "The ratings WGN America (delivers) don't justify the type of spending they do on the original programming side," he said, as quoted by Variety magazine.

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