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As it picked up five new drama series, the CW also has renewed its strongest bubble series, Gossip Girl, Nikita and Hart of Dixie. It will be the final season for Gossip, third for Nikita and second for Dixie. The pickups of Dixie and Nikita are for 22 episodes, Gossip‘s is for an 11-episode final season.
Related: CW Renews ‘Vampire Diaries’, ‘Supernatural’ & ’90210′; Are ‘Girl’, ‘ Dixie’ & ‘Nikita’ Next?
Meanwhile, as expected, low-rated freshmen Ringer and The Secret Circle are not coming back. Here what the three renewed series had going for them. Gossip Girl is a big DVR gainer and has been a signature show for the CW that could go well together with Carrie Diaries, Hart Of Dixie has been very strong in online viewing, and Nikita is a big international seller for the CW’s sister studio Warner Bros TV.
TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.
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Thank You CW for renewing HOD…I’m still waiting for TSC. Booooo on the Nikita pity renewal.
Thank you CW for renewing Nikita. Booooo on the GG and HOD pity renewals.
… Just kidding. I’m cool with HOD too. WOOO!
I agree. Gossip Girl didn’t really have to be renewed the way the finale went. It could have just ended there, with Chair, Serena leaving, Dan writing his book. I’d rather have TSC. And Nikita is just trash.
Should have known Nikita would be renewed the way WB was blasting ads on Deadline last week.
This show is really on the wrong network. Older audience, action filled, tightly written. Very underrated.
I appreciated the advertising on Deadline. The show needed all the help it could get. And what better way to get people’s attention that showing an image of two beautiful women ready to kick butt?
Yey for Nikita and HoD. Loving these renewal news. By the looks of things, Ringer’s going to be the sole freshman show that will end up dead (not counting The LA Complex)
The LA Complex was already renewed in its home country of Canada. The question will be whether or not CW decides to air the second season. I think part of the problem was that the first season finished its run in Canada long before the CW even aired it, so the majority of its young, tech-savvy audience that wanted to see it had already watched it online. Working with MuchMusic (the Canadian station) to simulcast the show should increase its viewership.
Whilst 22 episodes would be great, I think Nikita only needs another 13 episodes to wrap itself up. It’ll easily live on in syndication as a neat little package, plus I can see it doing well as a DVD box set.
Three seasons is not enough for syndication. Probably will go for 4.
syndication needs 5 seasons its the main reason fringe was a guarantee to be kept regadless of ratings
Actually syndication only requires 4 seasons or 88 episodes now. However, conventional wisdom is that the more episodes, the more lucrative syndication deals become.
NIKITA!!!!! Thank you to the CW network for giving Nikita a season 3!
This has to mean TSC is dead, right?
You seem to have forgotten about TSC ,that’s has had any nnews of renewal .
NIKITA ROCKS!
GOSSIP GIRL – one of the best !
Hart of Dixie – surprisingly entertaining
and I’m not 16
Yess at Hart!Nikitas a good show, but it’s ratings/demo suck and will only be worse so Nikita really dosent deserve renewal from a ratings point.Its also too far from syndication.
Nikita airs on Friday and currently pulls 4s. Factor in say, 2 demo points for the Friday factor, and it pulls the same demo as HoD!
If you calculate the Friday factor (.2), Nikita pulls in the same ratings as HoD.
LA Complex isn’t even a Cw show. That show is huge in Canada where it came from. Cw just didn’t do lots of promos and it shouldve came on in the summer.
gossip girl is getting an 11-episode final season.
Yeah for NIKITA !
Can’t imagine Nikita is anything less than 22. What would be point of 13 – gets it to 58 – not even close to syndication. Has to be 22 with defacto of S4
Very happy about Nikita. It’s one of the smartest shows that nobody is watching (live, anyway). I wonder how they factor in the Netflix streaming deal, online viewing, and DVD/Blu Ray. I hardly ever watch anything live on CW because the station looks terrible and no one will take responsibility (cable provider nor CW).
I just might watch Hart of Dixie when it comes to Netflix streaming, especially now that it is renewed.
Ringer just looked awful. Good riddance.
International sales and syndication money are possibly what were the determining factors.
Networks don’t care about online viewing or DVR viewing that’s not same day, and DVD sales have been in decline industry wide.
AGREED! Cannot believe it’s not available in HD (well, not with Dish Network anyway it’s not, which is what I have) and everything looks terrible on here. Not when you watch them on DVD though, just when you watch them on the actual network. They REALLY need to do something about this.
Seconded. Most CW shows look awful when broadcast. Some of this is budget, but most of it is technical transmission stuff I don’t understand at all but can’t believe they can’t fix. I remember when “Buffy” switched to UPN and suddenly its bright, flesh-hued WB look went all dank and sallow. (I was surprised at how much better that season looked on DVD). And then when UPN and WB became the CW everything got that ugly, cheap quality.
Actually The LA complex did pretty badly in Canada as well, although it was renewed.
Pleased that HOD got renewed, that’s a suprisingly sweet show.
HOW did Hart of Dixie get renewed??? It’s UNWATCHABLE.
Congrats to Gossip Girl & Nikita. No Ringer & TSC? boooo.
Great, now could you please put Nikita on a night that has actual viewers? Thanks.
I agree! Despite the odds (Friday lol), it survived! It should be moved back to Thursdays!
The CW? DO 12 yr olds have that much buying power?
Nikita is a big international seller for the CW’s sister studio Warner Bros TV
So was Pan Am and ABC canceled that crap!!!!!!!! Shame on the CW for this crap. TSC deserved to be renewed over that crapfest Nikita. CW is banned from this household.
CW is not ABC. CW relies on all forms of revenue; ads, licensing, intl distribution. Nikita has much better reviews, higher Metacritic score, better writing and is an adult-oriented action show in its 2nd year. HOD is more comparable competitor with TSC. If anything, you should focus your criticism on HOD because its the only freshman show that made it.
I cant BELIEVE they didnt renew The Secret Circle. I was really into that show and the season finale had a great cliffhanger, plus it went great with The Vampire Diaries, Ringer didnt work because it came on during the wrong time of the week it should have came on Friday’s after Nikita
i agree about the secret circle the cw did not give it enough of a chance. all around i lolved tsc especially jake and faye
What a pity, Nikita got saved last year and I’m afraid it has not progressed… The Secret Circle was an amazing show and it was very originol and Ringer were both great. the Secret Circle got decent rating much better than Nikita. The Secret Circle deserves a second chance and Ringer too pleas THE CW give them another shot especially The Secret Circle their trending worldwide on twitter.
Since it’s an Alloy show, The Secret Circle would make an especially good fit with ABC Family in a 9pm slot, IMO. Shelley Hennig and Phoebe Tonkin are finds that they shouldn’t let get away.
Circle is a mostly tight set-up that has only a couple of serious, but fixable, flaws. First, I don’t want to say that Britt Robertson was miscast — she fits right in chemisty-wise, but I think that the demands of what Cassie is supposed to be as written exceed her current grasp. She has seemed so unsure of what acting choices she should make in any of the situations where Cassie uses her powers selfishly or when she’s being led around by her father, the evil Blackwell, that it’s only served to make Cassie look like a gullible moron instead of a sweetheart teen who’s in over her head. I think that most of the audience lost respect for the character by about three-quarters of the way through the season.
But again, that’s not necessarily a fatal flaw for the show if it were to get a reprieve from Warner Studios and ABC Family. How Cassie was portrayed by Robertson in conjunction with the writers, while clearly not what they wanted, was, in an art-by-accident sense, not out-of-place in the show. The finale hinted that the writers know that they made a mistake with Cassie by having her apologize to the Circle for getting them into the whole mess and therefore, they’ve got it well-established that Cassie’s credulity, her gullibility, is something that they can now explore as an ongoing source of conflict.
The problem is, the show can’t have one of its least intelligent characters be its central focus — especially not when its *most* intelligent character, Diana, is played thoughtfully by Shelley Hennig. Hennig, in a so-far underwritten role, has been able to play a lot of the colors of internal emotional conflict that Robertson hasn’t been able to play as either Cassie or the much more complex Lux on her previous series, Life Unexpected. She’s navigated Diana’s free-floating disappointment at being displaced in leadership of the Circle and relationship with boyfriend Adam with a deftness, intstilling her with a sense of resilience, that has made her character immensely likeable. The writers also made a nifty course adjustment at midseason, having Diana confront what it means to be single again after breaking up with Adam that avoided some typical melodramatic pitfalls like acting out ala Marissa on The O.C. or just going completely whiny like Serena on Gossip Girl or falling completely apart like Jen on Dawson’s Creek.
She’s kinda beguiling like Joey Potter, so it would make more sense
that since this is a younger show than Dawson’s Creek was at the time that it fully embraced Joey as *the* central character (season 3, IMO), for this show to shift its focus from its Dawson (Cassie) to its Joey (Diana).
Also, that godawful theme song has got to go. The melody is fine, but the kindergarten la-la performance of it is so annoying that I think it singlehandedly alienated early audiences.
I would imagine that this is a slightly more expensive show than ABC Family is used to, but the channel has a relationship with Alloy and Warner that suggests to me that this is the right show to expand their ambition with. They’ve already shown interest in the supernatural/fantasy genre with Alloy’s The Nine Lives of Chloe King, which suffered greatly from being done on the cheap and they’ve already shown success with a number of CW-ish teen dramas like Separated At Birth and, of course, Pretty Little Liars. The channel wants to be either a sibling or a competitor (or both) of The CW. It’s not going to be able to succeed at that goal until it becomes willing to spend more in production value than they do for the unconvincing sets, cinematography and stuntwork on Liars, Chloe King, American Teenager and its other shows. Secret Circle seems to me to provide the opportunity for the channel to figure out how to step up its game.
And having the Kevin Williamson name on their schedule sure wouldn’t hurt, either.
Great comment. In particular, you are spot on about the mis-casting of the Cassie character (which was the major failing of the show for me), and the superiority of the actress who played Diana.
Thank you to the CW president and anyone else around that big round table for 22 episodes of Hart of Dixie season two – I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!
This show is ridiculously good and it’s now my goal to make every Australian I know tune into it!!!
Great news for Hart of Dixie! It’s their best show.
Sad about Ringer, it was so bad that it was a huge guilty pleasure.
The Secret Circle was a fun show and packed with more hot chicks per capita than any other show on television. I mean, seriously, what other show has 5(!) brutally hot girls in starring roles? I for one, am gonna miss it (tear).
Uh, Pretty Little Liars.