Why was Damnation cancelled when the reviews were this strong?
Damnation — the 1930s Depression-era labour drama that aired on USA Network in late 2017 — was cancelled after a single season of 10 episodes. Audiences who found it loved it fiercely. The problem was that almost nobody found it.
Here's the full picture.
What the show was
Created by Tony Tost and executive produced by James Mangold, Damnation was set in 1931 Iowa during the American labour wars. Killian Scott starred as Seth Davenport, a man posing as a small-town preacher while secretly working as a labour agitator. Logan Marshall-Green played Creeley Turner, a strikebreaker hired to crush the insurrection. The twist: the two men were estranged brothers.
The show was a co-production between Universal Cable Productions and Netflix, which held international streaming rights.
The reviews were genuinely strong
Rotten Tomatoes logged a 91% audience approval score. Critics were more divided — some found the pacing uneven early on — but the praise was often glowing. Mark Dawidziak of the Cleveland Plain Dealer compared it to a collaboration between John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett. Emily St. James praised its unflinching examination of a period TV hadn't properly explored. Multiple reviewers singled out the writing of its female characters, crediting the evenly split gender of the writers' room.
Alexis Gunderson wrote that Damnation "actually followed through on its promise to interrogate the corruption of capitalism and racism and the gulf of messy morality between what is good for the individual and what is good for society."
The back half of the season was widely regarded as stronger than the first — which made the timing of the cancellation especially painful.
So why was it cancelled?
Ratings. The numbers tell the whole story:
- Premiere — 1.4 million viewers.
- Season average — 682,000 viewers, with a 0.18 rating in the 18-49 demographic.
- Final episodes — below 500,000 viewers.
That made it one of USA Network's lowest-performing originals. The cancellation came on 25 January 2018, just one week after the season finale.
USA pulled the plug before Netflix's international release on 1 February — meaning the show never had a chance to prove itself with global numbers.
Fans campaigned hard for Netflix to pick it up independently. It never happened. The show was removed from Netflix entirely in 2023.
Expensive period drama, modest cable network, no promotion to speak of, and a title — Damnation — that Deadline suggested may have been "somewhat misleading" in attracting its natural audience. Everything that could work against it did.