We’ve never been the showrunners or stars of a moderate-to-low-rated TV comedy—alas!—but if we were, we can’t imagine a more horrifying time of day to contemplate than the late afternoon on the Friday before a three-day weekend. While everyone else is rushing off to hit the beach or drink stupor-ward or just generally not look at their phones, our hypothetical creators know that this is, more often than not, the Killing Hour—the time when networks can dump a lot of shows off their schedules all at once, without getting nearly as much pushback as they otherwise might.
All of which is to say: Netflix pulled out the axe this evening, with Variety reporting that the streamer has just canceled fully four single- or second-season comedies on its roster: The Crew, Bonding, Mr. Iglesias, and Country Comfort. Which your brain may or may not have short-handed as “the Kevin James one,” “the dominatrix comedy,” “the Gabriel Iglesias one,” and “the Katherine McPhee one,” because few things challenge the human mind’s capacity for memory worse than remembering every single original offering on Netflix’s streaming roster.
To be more robust, though: The Crew, still in its first season, starred James as an older NASCAR person very mad at younger NASCAR people played by folks like Jillian Mueller and Freddie Stroma. Bonding, meanwhile, is the outlier of this bunch: A single-cam dark comedy in a sea of multi-cam sitcoms, centered on a professional dominatrix, played by Zoe Levin, who hires an old high school friend (Brendan Scannell) to serve as her assistant. The series ran for two seasons.
Also two years in: Mr. Iglesias, which starred uber-popular stand-up Gabriel Iglesias as a high school teacher, working alongside the likes of Sherri Shepherd and Jacob Vargas. And finally, there’s Country Comfort, which would be extremely reductive to describe as “The Nanny if it took place in a red state,” so we’ll just note that McPhee plays a country singer whose boyfriend kicks her out of their band (in one of those crushing scenes), and then she ends up as the nanny to a bunch of rowdy kids under false pretenses.
Netflix has been on a bit of a cancellation kick of late; the streamer also recently parted ways with Mark Millar’s Jupiter’s Legacy, and ended another comedy, Jamie Foxx’s Dad Stop Embarrassing Me, which would have fit right in the niche with tonight’s bloody kills. That being said, few of these cancellations seem to be about severing existing relationships between the streamer and its stars; James and Iglesias both have deals in place for future projects at Netflix (a new single-cam series and a comedy special, respectively), as does Bonding creator Rightor Doyle.