Will TNT Go South on Southland Too?
When TNT rescued Southland after NBC dropped it, the relief came with a nagging question: would a second network be any more patient than the first?
The rescue itself was good news with an asterisk. NBC had renewed the Los Angeles police drama, filmed its second season and then cancelled it before broadcast. TNT stepped in, gave the finished episodes a home in early 2010 and kept the series alive. For a show that had been declared dead in public, that was a remarkable reprieve. It was also, as fans quickly pointed out, no guarantee of anything.
Reasons to worry
Several things made the arrangement look fragile at the time.
- Fit. TNT’s original dramas of the period, such as The Closer and Rizzoli & Isles, were polished, accessible crime shows with a reassuring rhythm. Southland was jittery, bleak and often deliberately unresolved. It was fair to wonder whether the audience TNT had built would follow.
- Money. A show made to a broadcast budget does not automatically make sense on a cable network’s numbers. Any renewal was likely to mean economies, and economies in an ensemble drama usually mean a smaller cast or shorter seasons.
- Precedent. Shows that change networks have a mixed record. A move can bring a second wind, or it can simply delay the end while the new owner decides the experiment is not worth it.
Those fears were not paranoid. When TNT renewed the series beyond the inherited episodes, it reportedly did so on leaner terms, and the seasons that followed were short. Viewers who had fallen for the sprawling first-season ensemble noticed that the show now had less room to wander.
What actually happened
Here the story takes a happier turn than the worriers expected. Instead of fading out, Southland arguably got sharper on TNT. The leaner format seemed to push it towards fewer threads and more concentrated stories, and the partnership between Michael Cudlitz’s veteran training officer and the younger officers around him became the spine of the show. Regina King’s detective work grounded the other half. Shawn Hatosy, added to the cast after the first season, became a key part of the later ensemble.
The series ran on TNT until 2013, finishing with five seasons in total, far more than its NBC treatment had suggested it would ever get. It never became a mass hit, and it remained the kind of show whose admirers spent much of their time recommending it to people who had never heard of it. But the cable move did what fans had hoped: it let the drama finish on something closer to its own terms.
Looking back, the question in this article’s title had a reasonable answer. TNT did not go south on Southland. It trimmed it, squeezed it and occasionally kept fans guessing about renewal, but it gave a distinctive police drama the room its first network would not.
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