5 reasons ABC might have canceled the Tim Allen comedy Last Man Standing

It’s not often a network cancels its second most-watched comedy in a sudden, surprising move. Usually, if a show that important to a network has to go out, it’s granted some sort of “this will be your final season” reprieve. (Think of how CBS handled the end of How I Met Your Mother in 2014, for instance.)

Yet such a scenario has unfolded — surprising most industry observers (myself included) — with ABC’s Last Man Standing, a Tim Allen star vehicle that airs Friday nights and quietly pulls in more total viewers than any comedy on the network not named Modern Family. Indeed, it’s ABC’s third most-watched scripted show, period, after Modern Family and number one series Grey’s Anatomy. (Deadline has more exact viewership data, should you so desire.) And yet the network canceled it after its sixth season, without even a planned series finale.

The cancellation has left some conservative pundits wondering if Last Man Standing was canceled because Allen himself is conservative, and his character on the series is as well. (The other characters around him lean more toward the moderate or liberal, making Last Man Standing sort of a modern update of All in the Family, where everybody seems to have gotten their talking points from cable news.)

Is that true? It’s impossible to say. There are a ton of business reasons to cancel Last Man Standing, and the show’s much-vaunted viewership stats are less impressive than they seem when you dig into them. But still. Most renewal predictions had Last Man Standing safely closing in on a seventh season.

So was it Allen’s conservative lean? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe? But probably not. Here are five other reasons Last Man Standing might be toast.

After season five, if a show isn’t a blockbuster (like The Big Bang Theory or The Walking Dead), every additional season becomes harder and harder to procure, even if the ratings are pretty good on the whole.

The reason is simple — actors, writers, technicians, and other people who’ve stayed with the show for its full run begin to earn pay bumps, usually seeing solid raises in seasons six and seven especially. (You’ll often hear about studios agreeing to new “two- or three-year deals” with certain cast members post-season five, and that’s often to lock those cast members in at a rate the studio can live with for future seasons.)

This makes a lot of sense. Traditionally, seasons four and five are when a studio starts to make back the money it’s invested into a series, from syndication and other means. And Last Man Standing has both lucrative syndication and cable rerun deals with various networks, which have paid off in solid ratings that fed back into the main program (which actually saw viewership increases in season six — almost unheard of).

But it also probably caught the show in a weird Catch-22. Last Man Standing was successful — but not successful enough. It was doing well enough to justify better pay for the cast, especially, but it wasn’t doing well enough for the studio to demand more money from the network (more on this below).

Finally, Tim Allen himself has always commanded a solid salary — which usually happens when a former TV star or someone who’s gone on to movie success (both of which apply to Allen) returns to TV — so Last Man Standing was already an expensive show. This only compounded that problem.

Though Last Man Standing posted total viewership increases, its ratings among younger viewers actually decreased very slightly, to the tune of 4 percent. And those numbers were never all that great to begin with. The show’s viewership had always trended slightly older than networks tend to prefer.

That’s because slightly older viewership makes a show less valuable to advertisers on the whole. (Advertisers pay a premium to reach viewers under 50, as it’s believed that those viewers are more likely to switch up the brands they buy.)

Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if Last Man Standing were a blockbuster hit, but it was simply a solid hit. So its inability to gain more younger viewers when it was gaining more viewers overall stood out even more.

If there’s a main culprit I’d point to as the reason for Last Man Standing’s cancellation, it’s either the show’s age or its ownership. ABC isn’t the studio behind Last Man Standing. Instead, it licenses the show from 20th Century Fox, paying a per-episode fee to the studio. Consequently, ABC gets to keep the bulk of the money from advertising.

As a show gets older, the studio typically demands a higher and higher licensing fee from the network — the better to recoup more of its production costs. This happens because anytime a show has run that long, it’s presumed to be a hit and therefore valuable to the network. (Modern Family, which is also produced by Fox, has always run on ABC without apparent major renegotiations of its licensing fee, which suggests ABC is happy to pay a larger one. But that show is also a bigger hit.)

This doesn’t always happen with a show in Last Man Standing’s position, and ABC has, indeed, negotiated its licensing fee down in recent seasons. But according to the Deadline report, it didn’t even attempt to negotiate with Fox this year.

There’s one big reason this might be the case: Since ABC doesn’t own the show, it doesn’t get any of the show’s ancillary revenues — from streaming services and syndication and cable reruns and international broadcasts. Those all go to the studio, Fox. ABC pretty much just collects ad revenue at this point.

Thus, ABC has no incentive to keep making more episodes of the show from a financial perspective, where Fox has huge incentive to do so. It’s easy to see how that situation could have grown unsustainable.

The biggest news out of the TV industry this week has been that ABC has closed a deal to bring back American Idol, which last aired in 2016 (and on a different network, no less). Since the network has seen major success with The Bachelor and (occasionally) Dancing With the Stars in the 2010s, it makes sense for it to add another venerable reality franchise to its docket.

But Idol takes up a lot of space. You need two hours for the performance show, then at least 30 minutes on another night for the results show. That means a lot of other series have to be moved around or canceled to squeeze it in, and ABC, already one of the lowest-rated networks, has been canceling a lot of series. (Among the non-Last Man casualties: The Real O’Neals, American Crime, and The Catch, which has ABC favorite Shonda Rhimes behind it.)

Another ABC goner? Dr. Ken, which airs right after Last Man Standing on Friday nights and holds onto a healthy percentage of the Last Man audience (though less than it did last year). The cancellation of both suggests that ABC may be overhauling its Friday night, thanks to having to move other programs due to the arrival of Idol.

And ABC president Channing Dungey admitted as much during a conference call with reporters Tuesday, May 16. The decision to cancel the show stemmed from all of the above — and ABC’s decision to get out of the comedy business on Friday night.

“When we made the decision not to continue with comedies on Friday [cancellation was] where it landed,” she said.

Do I think Last Man Standing would be coming back next season if everything else were exactly the same as all of the above and the show didn’t star Hollywood’s most prominent Donald Trump supporter? I don’t not think that. I think there are a bunch of really good business reasons for the show to end — but I also don’t know that its increased reputation as “a sitcom for Donald Trump supporters” didn’t hurt it just a little bit. (Strangely, though, it did less with our current political landscape after Trump won.)

To be clear, I’m not saying that ABC’s executives walked into a boardroom and said, “We’ve got to get rid of our conservative-skewing sitcom!” They probably looked at how much Last Man Standing costs, its aging audience, its ownership, and their network’s upcoming schedule and realized it didn’t make a ton of sense to renew the show for another season, even if that season was planned as one last go-round. And Hollywood has a long history of supporting stars who say controversial things — even controversial conservative things — if those stars continue to make money for their studios and networks.

But I also keep asking myself if everything about Last Man Standing were exactly the same except it somehow starred the famously non-controversial (at least in 2017) Ted Danson, would it be back on the air? Probably not — but the hypothetical still gives me pause. Any time the only show of one type or another, even if it’s “the only sitcom headlined by a major Trump supporter,” leaves the air, it’s hard not to wonder.

Updated with comments from Channing Dungey.