Amazon Prime Video Cancels Yet Another TV Show

Prime Video’s cancellation scorecard just got a little longer.

Clean Slate, legendary TV producer Norman Lear’s final completed project before his death in 2023, has been canceled by the Amazon streaming service after just a single season.

The series premiered on Prime Video back on Feb. 6, but by the end of March, “our eight-episode series, our labor of love, was canceled,” series stars Laverne Cox and George Wallace, as well as their fellow co-creator Dan Ewen, wrote in a guest column on Deadline published Friday. “A seven-year effort was gone in a puff of server exhaust.”

Clean Slate, the “first ever trans-starring sitcom,” starred Cox, Wallace, Jay Wilkison, D.K. Uzoukwu, Telma Hopkins, Philip Garcia, and Norah Murphy. The comedy series followed Wallace’s Harry Slate, “an old-school and outspoken Alabama car wash owner, who has a lot of soul searching to do when the estranged child he thought was a son returns home to Mobile as a proud, trans woman, Desiree (Cox).”

Prime Video hasn’t addressed the show’s cancellation, or provided an explanation for why it was axed after just a single season. However, as the trio wrote, “the process of finding a home for the show was full of stops, starts and a few horrifying, non-validated parking scenarios.”

Clean Slate was originally reported to be in development at Peacock in 2020, but it later moved to Amazon-owned Freevee in 2021. Freevee, which built a solid standing of half-hour comedies, was shut down in 2024, and Clean Slate subsequently moved to Prime Video, where smaller comedies often struggle to stand out among the streamer’s drama-heavy lineup. Fellow comedy The Pradeeps Of Pittsburgh, also initially set at Freevee, was also canceled earlier this year.

Despite possibly facing an uphill battle standing out on Prime Video – the streamer didn’t release viewership data for Clean Slate Season 1 – the series still premiered to favorable reviews. Clean Slate holds an 89% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where a critics consensus reads, “like the sitcoms of yore, this new age Norman Lear production boasts an uplifting, heart-filled world in tune with the stylish workings of the one and only, Laverne Cox.” The series holds an 82% audience score.

“We’re not gonna sit here and pretend we’re the first show to get canceled. Hell, four shows were zapped while you read this,” Cox, Wallace, and Ewen wrote. “We humbly thank those at Sony and Amazon who worked on and on the behalf of Clean Slate. It is a privilege and a joy to make a living in the creative sphere, let alone while telling a story of import. You helped make it all possible.”

Although the show has concluded at Prime Video, Cox, Wallace, and Ewen vowed that they “will push to keep the story alive, for the sake of the kind of people portrayed in it, the kind of people being legislated out of existence, or erased from history books. It feels like it’s time to fight like hell for nice things.”