Variety is reporting AMC has canceled "Low Winter Sun."
Variety says:
The drama, which debuted on the cabler in August, failed to attract a substantial audience, even though AMC phenomenon “Breaking Bad” served as its lead-in on Sunday nights.
The Detroit-set crime drama is based on a British miniseries and centered on homicide detectives who kill a dirty cop. The show opened to 2.5 million viewers . . . but quickly began sliding, drawing well under 1 million viewers by the end of its run in October.
In a review in the New York Times in August, TV critic Alessandra Stanley was as unenthusiastic as most reviewers.
“Low Winter Sun,” a new AMC series that also begins on Sunday, has a classic film noir premise: a well-meaning sap is tricked into committing murder. In this case, an honest cop intent on avenging a loved one fears that he may have been played. And the wrongdoing unfolds in Detroit, so it doesn’t take much to set a mood of desperation and decline.
Yet “Low Winter Sun” is so clotted with bleak cityscapes, shadowy interiors and brooding portent that the narrative sags under the weight of all that mood-setting. The creators probably wanted to telegraph up front that this is not a CBS-style network procedural, but that’s a given in this golden age of cable. It’s a deadly serious drama, but some of the early scenes are so overwrought that they are almost laughable.
“Low Winter Sun,” which was adapted from a British mini-series by the same name, doesn’t need to overreach. It has an intriguing story, an aptly sinister setting and an excellent cast, led by the British actor Mark Strong as Frank Agnew, a homicide detective with a tragedy in his past. Lennie James (“The Walking Dead”) is Joe, a seasoned and able detective who seems to have several agendas that have little to do with crime-solving. David Costabile, whose credits include “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad,” plays an Internal Affairs detective.
The series presents a dystopian view of urban decay that makes the Baltimore of “The Wire” look almost like Monte Carlo. This Detroit is a fetid no man’s land that law-abiding citizens fled long ago, leaving whole blocks abandoned, houses boarded over and feral dogs roaming empty streets. There are some amusing touches: on a street of crumbling houses and weedy lawns piled with crushed debris, a green plastic garbage can stands at the curb, ready for pickup — a pale demarcation dividing order and bedlam. The line between cops and criminals is almost as faint, and eventually that attracts the attention of Internal Affairs.
