After season five, if a show isn’t a blockbuster (like The Big Bang Theory or The Walking Dead), every additional season becomes harder and harder to procure, even if the ratings are pretty good on the whole.
The reason is simple — actors, writers, technicians, and other people who’ve stayed with the show for its full run begin to earn pay bumps, usually seeing solid raises in seasons six and seven especially. (You’ll often hear about studios agreeing to new “two- or three-year deals” with certain cast members post-season five, and that’s often to lock those cast members in at a rate the studio can live with for future seasons.)
This makes a lot of sense. Traditionally, seasons four and five are when a studio starts to make back the money it’s invested into a series, from syndication and other means. And Last Man Standing has both lucrative syndication and cable rerun deals with various networks, which have paid off in solid ratings that fed back into the main program (which actually saw viewership increases in season six — almost unheard of).
But it also probably caught the show in a weird Catch-22. Last Man Standing was successful — but not successful enough. It was doing well enough to justify better pay for the cast, especially, but it wasn’t doing well enough for the studio to demand more money from the network (more on this below).
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There’s one big reason this might be the case: Since ABC doesn’t own the show, it doesn’t get any of the show’s ancillary revenues — from streaming services and syndication and cable reruns and international broadcasts. Those all go to the studio, Fox. ABC pretty much just collects ad revenue at this point.
Thus, ABC has no incentive to keep making more episodes of the show from a financial perspective, where Fox has huge incentive to do so. It’s easy to see how that situation could have grown unsustainable.
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On a call, ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey called the decision to not renew Last Man Standing the type of “tough calls” she needs to make in her job. Asked whether the show’s content and the fact that Allen is a prominent Republican played a role in the decision, she said, “I canceled Last Man Standing for the same business and scheduling reasons I canceled The Real O’Neals, Dr. Ken, The Catch, American Crime.”
“It was a challenging (call) because it was steady performer but when we made the decision not to continue with comedies on Friday that’s where it landed,” she added.
