Last month, Syfy announced – rather surprisingly – that it had decided to cancel its acclaimed sci-fi series The Expanse after three seasons, only for Amazon Studios to swoop in and revive the show with a season four order.
The move wasn’t entirely unexpected, given that Amazon already held the streaming rights to the first three seasons, and the novels by James S. A. Corey are said to be a particular favourite of Jeff Bezos. Now, in an interview with Deadline, Amazon Studios’ CEO Jennifer Salke has discussed the acquisition and detailed how the rescue came about:
“There were airplanes circling us, I was having cakes delivered, there was a whole thing happening,” said Salke. “And then really smart people, whose opinions I really value creatively, started reaching out to me, saying, ‘have you seen this show, The Expanse, it’s actually great’. I hadn’t so I spent some time, I watched the show and I was like, this show is actually really well done, why is nobody watching it? At the same time, Jeff Bezos was getting emails from everyone from George R.R. Martin to every captain of industry, like the founder of Craigslist, and they were all writing, saying, there’s this show, it’s so great, you have to see it, you have to buy it or save it.”
“We were trying to explore the deal, and we could make the U.S. deal pretty easily because they were kind of just standing outside, holding it out to us. We had it pretty much done when Bezos emailed saying, “I’m at an event, a space seminar, I’m looking at the cast of The Expansehere, I would like to get up there and order the show. Can I, can I?” I was like, let me check with business affairs, and then replied, you can do it, go for it. It was so fun to watch it on Twitter Live; I could see him do it in real time. So, yes, he’s a big fan, and it was fun to be able to support that, not just for him but for all the people that really love that show.”
The third season of The Expanse is set to wrap up on Syfy with the season finale on June 27th.
