Political Animals may have been cancelled after just one season, but according to the powers that be, it helped pave the way to the success of Mr. Robot, which earned an early Season 2 renewal from USA ahead of its series premiere.
Bonnie Hammer, chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Group told Ad Week:
“Political Animals was before its time: a little darker, a little edgie. The audience wasn’t ready for it. Those who were coming for Royal Pains and Suits were not ready for cocaine-addicted kids, a heavier hand in politics and for cloudier, edgier [material]. They weren’t anti-heroes, but they weren’t all nice and pretty and ‘blue skies.'”
So USA retreated, canceled the show and retrenched. “[We] realized that we had to figure out: ‘What does it mean to have some clouds in the sky, and how cloudy and edgy can we go?'” said Hammer.
“We took a few swings at bat, we didn’t nail it with the first couple, to be honest,” said Hammer, citing Rush, USA’s 2014 medical drama that quickly came and went. “It was an interesting, dark character in the medical world, but so what? Been there, done that before.”
Instead, Hammer and her USA team realized that “we wanted to nail something in the zeitgeist,” she told Adweek last month. “And that’s where Mr. Robot came.”
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