Ellen DeGeneres’ ‘Game of Games’ Canceled at NBC

Ellen DeGeneres will have even more time on her hands after The Ellen DeGeneres Show wraps up its 19th season. NBC canceled her gameshow series Ellen’s Game of Games following its fourth season. The show’s final episode aired back in May 2021.

Ellen’s Game of Games debuted in March 2017, and its first season included just eight episodes. The show’s final season aired between October 2020 and May 2021. NBC has no plans to bring the show back for a fifth season as the series’s audience continued to dwindle during its run, reports Deadline.

DeGeneres hosted Game of Games and served as an executive producer. The series featured versions of the most popular games on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, including “Aw Snap!,” “Blindfolded Musical Chairs,” “Know Or Go” and “You Bet Your Wife.” At the end of each episode, the last contestant plays “Hot Hands/Hotter Hands” for a chance to win $100,000. Stephen “tWitch” Boss also served as the announcer.

This is the latest unscripted show to disappear from NBC’s lineup. Last year, the network decided not to order a fifth season of Jennifer Lopez’s World of Dance. The peacock network is still home to America’s Got Talent, which will return for another season this year. The spinoff America’s Got Talent: Extreme is expected to debut this year as well, but production was put on hold after a stuntman suffered a near-fatal accident during rehearsals.

DeGeneres is now in the middle of the 19th and final season of her daytime talk show. Although the announcement that the show will end came after she and her producers became embroiled in a behind-the-scenes misconduct controversy during the summer of 2020, DeGeneres insisted this was not the main reason for ending the show. If that was the case, she told The Hollywood Reporter she would have ended the show immediately.

“It broke my heart when I learned that people here had anything other than a fantastic experience – that people were hurt in any way,” the comedian told THR in May 2021. “I check in now as much as I can through Zoom to different departments, and I make sure people know that if there’s ever a question or ever anything, they can come to me, and I don’t know why that was never considered before. I’m not a scary person. I’m really easy to talk to. So, we’ve all learned from things that we didn’t realize – or I didn’t realize – were happening. I just want people to trust and know that I am who I appear to be.”