“The Expanse,” the sci-fi series that Syfy canceled earlier this month, will find a new life — and a fourth season — on Amazon Prime, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced late Friday.
Series producer Alcon Entertainment had been shopping the show since its cancellation. The final episode of the third season is set to air on Syfy in July.
The series, created by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, follows a police detective in the asteroid belt, the first officer of an interplanetary ice freighter and an earth-bound United Nations executive slowly discover a vast conspiracy that threatens the Earth’s rebellious colony on the asteroid belt.
Syfy only held the rights for “The Expanse’s” first run on linear television in the U.S., which put a lot of pressure on “live” viewing. Those audiences never came despite an increased marketing budget for the show and experiments with different lead-ins.
The NBCU cable network had even produced a documentary about the series, which aired ahead of Season 2 — but nothing brought Nielsen numbers that anyone would consider “out-of-this-world.”
Alcon Entertainment co-founders and co-CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson said in a statement: “We couldn’t be more excited that ‘The Expanse’ is going to continue on Amazon Prime! We are deeply grateful that Jeff Bezos, Jen Salke, and their team at Amazon have shown such faith in our show.”
The pair also thanked fans of the series for “the staggering outpouring of support from the most creative, hardest working sci-fi fans around the world. From reddit campaigns to airplanes, we say thank you. It worked!”