Karl Urban's 2013 Sci-Fi Series Could Have Been As Big As The Boys, But Was Unjustly Canceled After 1 Season
In 2013, The Boys’ Karl Urban starred in a sci-fi series called Almost Human that had all the makings of a hit, but only lasted one season. Throughout his career, Urban has played plenty of iconic characters: Judge Dredd, Bones in the Star Trek reboot trilogy, Éomer in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and, of course, Billy Butcher in The Boys. Urban’s delightfully profane performance as Butcher has made him a bigger star than ever, and a staple of the small screen.
Urban’s character in Almost Human could’ve joined that iconic rogues’ gallery and made him a staple of the small screen six years earlier, but the show never got a chance to get off the ground. Usually, when a TV show fails as quickly and spectacularly as Almost Human, the reasons are clear: it got terrible reviews or the cast’s chemistry didn’t click or it was derivative of much better shows. But Almost Human didn’t have any of these problems and it was still a one-season wonder.
Karl Urban's Almost Human Had All The Ingredients Necessary To Become A Sci-Fi Hit
Almost Human Put A Sci-Fi Spin On A Classic Buddy Cop Story
Set in 2048, Almost Human takes place in a dystopian future where rapid advances in science and technology have caused crime rates to rise by an astonishing 400%. To combat these escalating crime rates, the police enforce a new policy that requires every human cop to be paired up with a combat-model android partner. Urban plays John Kennex, a grizzled detective who resents these android cops because one of them left his old partner to die. Michael Ealy plays Dorian, the cyborg assigned to be Kennex’s new partner.
Mismatched detectives are a time-tested character dynamic, and forcing a robot-hating human cop to work with a robot cop was a great way to use that dynamic to explore sci-fi subjects like A.I. and self-identity.
This premise put an interesting sci-fi spin on the classic buddy cop story. Mismatched detectives are a time-tested character dynamic, and forcing a robot-hating human cop to work with a robot cop was a great way to use that dynamic to explore sci-fi subjects like A.I. and self-identity. Almost Human was executive-produced by J.J. Abrams, so it had one of TV’s most successful hit-makers at the helm. But Fox canceled it after one season.
Why Almost Human Was Canceled After Just 1 Season
Low Ratings & High Production Costs Doomed The Show
On April 29, 2014, Fox canceled Almost Human after just one season. The cancelation was blamed on a combination of low viewership figures and high production costs. Making a show about androids set in 2048 doesn’t come cheap, so Almost Human needed a huge audience to justify its bloated budget. The show needed similar ratings to CSI in order to score a second season. On top of that, Fox’s fall schedule was already jam-packed, so Almost Human had to be squeezed out.
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