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A year ago, NBC canceled five scripted series in one day (and later a sixth) to help clear space on its schedule for primetime NBA games. Fox and CBS also axed six shows last year, including one pre-announced series end, and ABC dropped two shows.

In raw numbers, the 20 canceled shows last year were the most for the big four networks since 2022. In terms of percentage of scripted series canceled or ended (34.5 percent), it was the highest since 2020. It was easy to look at that, along with a much longer-term trend of declines in the total number of scripted series and ever-larger footprints for live sports, and predict the imminent demise of the network comedy and drama.

That demise might not be quite as imminent now.

While the networks ordered about the same number of new series this year (11) as they did in 2025 (12), cancellation numbers went way down — from 20 to just six, as of publication time. (One show, NBC’s second-year drama The Hunting Party, is still in limbo, and Fox’s miniseries The Faithful isn’t included in the cancellation number.) The result: There will be 55 scripted series on the big four in the 2026-27 season — one more on each network than there were in 2025-26 — with a small chance that a renewal for The Hunting Party could bump the total up to 56.

The uptick may also signal a deeper recognition of the symbiotic relationship between networks and their associated streaming platforms. “I think they both have very bright futures,” Jeff Bader, president program planning and strategy at NBC, said in a press session before this week’s upfronts. “When it comes to reaching the most people, watching the same thing at basically the same time, there’s nothing that compares to broadcast. And we’re very lucky that we do have Peacock, because the strength of streaming is it allows our shows to grow over time, which is incredibly important to scripted series. Some of our shows get 50 percent of their audience from Peacock, and even more importantly, they get younger.”

ABC’s scheduling chief, Ari Goldman, also noted that putting together an on-air schedule and considering a show’s streaming afterlife go hand in hand now.

“We know we’re not going to change how people want to watch TV, but we can make sure our content is scheduled in a smart, consistent fashion and make sure we’re introducing the right audiences at the right times,” Goldman, senior vp content strategy and scheduling at the network, told The Hollywood Reporter. “When I think about the linear schedule, we obviously are concerned with timeslots and days of the week, and making sure we have optimized for audience flow. But we’re also very mindful of how this content is then hitting the streaming service. We don’t want to have too many interruptions, and we want to be mindful of the times of year that might be lighter in terms of launching original series on streaming, where we can come in with our current content.”

Of course, 55 or 56 shows is still a far cry from the 87 scripted series on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC just five seasons ago. The uptick, however, is the first since 2024, and that year’s increase was at least partly an after-effect of the previous year’s strikes when networks held back a few shows that had been initially developed for 2023-24. Whether this year is another blip or the start of at least a small rebuild is of course impossible to say yet, but the number of shows increasing (as did the number of pilots networks made) is an encouraging sign.