Announced by series creator James Roland on his blog after last night’s season finale, Syfy has decided to cancel their grindhouse series Blood Drive after its freshman year. The news does not come as a huge surprise considering the shows dwindling ratings, especially over the last month. The show actually started out with decent numbers for a Syfy entry, posting a 0.24 score based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic for its series premiere in June. But apparently the larger audience was not quite up to speed with the show’s over-the-top tone as the ratings started to drop off to less than half that number, especially over the last month and a half. Blood Drive did apparently generate some activity on the social nets, but not enough to keep it alive and it did not see much in the way of delayed viewing gains either (more important to the cable nets than the broadcast nets).
Unlike the recently cancelled Dark Matter, Blood Drive was owned by Syfy’s parent company NBC/Universal, but they apparently decided the viewership was too low to keep it going. Roland did acknowledge that Syfy was the only network that took a chance on the show and he also indicated that he will pitch a second season to NBC/Universal. I’m not sure if he wants them to produce that with plans to sell it to one of the streaming services, but he has not given up on the show yet. He has also asked fans to take the social networks with the #RenewBloodDrive hashtag in hopes of generating some buzz. Since this was just announced, I’m not sure yet what the fan reaction will be, but in this day and age I guess you can’t count any show out too soon.
Blood Drive is a Grindhouse-type series in which the last good cop in LA finds himself pulled into on a cross-country race where the cars use blood for fuel. It stars Alan Ritchson, Christina Ochoa, Thomas Dominique, and Colin Cunningham. With this cancellation announcement, we now know the fate of all of Syfy’s Summer shows with Killjoys and Wynonna Earp getting renewed, Blood Drive and Dark Matter getting cancelled.
With the recent announcement of the cancellation of DARK MATTER, it is just one more HUGE nail in the NBC/SyFy screwy merger coffin. It is also ONE more reason why I, and a large number of my friends, will be turning to OTHER networks, and leaving Sy-crap channel behind. This channel has fallen into a sink hole since the takeover, and for many TRUE, DIE-HARD, sci-fi fans, its cancellations like DARK MATTER and others, we continue to see SyFy pundits “slip-sliding-away.” Goodbye SyFy Channel, you probably won’t be missed, or remembered, for that matter. ~Alexa:(