Orson Scott Card’s post-apocalyptic series Extinct has landed in the top ten on Prime Video, nearly nine years after BYUtv killed it after one season, and Card used the moment to announce a new novel set in the same world.
Extinct premiered on BYUtv on October 1, 2017, as the network’s second scripted original series. Card wrote it with his longtime collaborator Aaron Johnston, who co-wrote the First Formic War trilogy and two additional Ender’s Game novels with Card and scripted several Ender’s Game comics. Ryan Little directed. The show started life as a planned film before Adam Abel, a producer at the family-friendly streaming network, pushed to develop it as a television series through production companies Taleswapper and GoFilms.
The premise is set 400 years after aliens exterminate the human race. A mysterious obelisk and its drones revive a group of humans, using brain states captured before their deaths in the invasion, and task them with rebuilding civilization in a hostile world. Ezra (Chad Michael Collins), Feena (Victoria Atkin), and Abram (Yorke Fryer) anchor the cast, joined by Jaclyn Hales, Jack Depew, Matthew Bellows, Jake Stormoen, Kirby Heyborne, and Anna Vocino. All ten episodes aired by November 19, 2017.
The show never drew enough critic reviews to register a Rotten Tomatoes score, but it landed an 83% audience score. Post Apocalyptic Media’s Derek Dwilson wrote at the time that the series “deserves to be renewed” following what he called its “impressive” Season 1 finale.
BYUtv announced on January 5, 2018, that it would not bring the show back. Johnston had spent the preceding fall urging fans to contact the network directly and lobby for a second season, a campaign that generated buzz within the sci-fi community but not enough volume to move the network. BYUtv’s cancellation statement did not cite ratings. The network said it does not make renewal decisions solely on audience size and the resulting financial impact, and that it instead weighs a show’s content and message, its resonance with fans, its uniqueness in the television landscape, and its fit with the network’s strategic aims as a source of family content.
Card offered a different account of what happened behind the scenes. In a 2020 interview with Ben Shapiro, he said a change in BYUtv’s management was the real reason the show ended, since it was, in his words, “getting really good responses.” He continued: “It’s one of those things where if it didn’t grow in their garden, they’re not interested.”
The full first season stayed available to stream free on the BYUtv site and app, and later spread to The CW app and PLEX. It sat there quietly for years, the kind of show fans occasionally circulated on message boards and canceled-show retrospectives, until Amazon added it to Prime Video. According to FlixPatrol, Extinct sat at No. 7 on Prime Video as of August 18, nearly nine years after its cancellation. It joins a run of shows finding new audiences through streaming distribution long after their original networks gave up on them, following the recent climb of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on the Apple TV Store almost 16 years after Fox canceled it.
Johnston had said in the years following cancellation that the plan was to continue the story in novel form, though nothing materialized for years. Card’s announcement this week appears to make good on that plan. He wrote on X: “Fun to see our axed-too-soon show EXTINCT suddenly landing in the top 10 on Prime Video. Now might be a good time to announce the first book in a new series of Extinct novels, titled Burning Water, will be published by TOR in May 2027.”
Burning Water will launch a new Extinct novel series through Tor, taking the world Card and Johnston built for a small non-profit network back in 2017 and putting it in print for the first time. The timing lines up directly with the show’s unplanned second life on Prime Video, giving a series BYUtv walked away from after ten episodes a real shot at reaching the audience it never got the first time around.
Extinct‘s complete first season is streaming now on Prime Video. How many other faith-based and small-network originals are sitting on streaming libraries right now, waiting for the algorithm to finally find them?
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