When it comes to adapting a story from page to screen, things can be tricky. Fans have seen it countless times when a beloved book or comic gets picked up for a movie or television series and by the time the finished product arrives it’s not exactly what they were hoping for. It’s the rare project that delivers on its source material in a way that is not only satisfying for fans, but just good entertainment in general. It’s even more rare for such a project to get critical acclaim, fan support, and end up with a promising renewal, but seven years ago one such television series debuted that did exactly that. It was a great adaptation of a great comic, everyone loved it, it got a season renewal… and then it was all snatched away.
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On September 25, 2019, Stumptown debuted on ABC. The series was based on the comic book series of the same name by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth and it came out of the gate strong. Stumptown starred Marvel star Cobie Smulders as Dexadrine “Dex” Parios, a military veteran now working as a private eye, dealing with PTSD from her time in the military and struggling to get out of serious gambling debt. Her work sees her involved in problems the police won’t deal with. For 18 episodes, it was a practically perfect comics adaptation and a nearly perfect detective series. The series was renewed for a second season in May of 2020, but just a few months later, ABC reversed that renewal, ending what could have been an all-time great series.
Why Did Stumptown Get Cancelled After Getting Renewed?
A network reversing a renewal isn’t exactly an unheard-of thing, but in the case of Stumptown it is really a matter of bad timing for the show and had nothing to do with fan response or ratings. Stumptown had debuted in the fall of 2019 and the first season ended in March of 2020 — which, if you recall, was right when the world shut down because of COVID-19. While the series’ renewal was announced in May of that year along with other series renewals, there was a little bit of optimism that Hollywood and the world would be getting back to normal quickly. That’s not how things actually played out. There were still a lot of delays, uncertainty, and even significant restrictions because of the pandemic. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that a second season of Stumptown wouldn’t arrive in time for the Fall 2020 television season. It wouldn’t be ready until April 2021 at the earliest.
But it wasn’t just COVID related delays that were hampering Stumptown. The series was going to see a big shift for Season 2 with the departure of showrunner Matt Olmstead. Olmstead left Stumptown to be showrunner for Law & Order: Organized Crime and Monica Owusu-Breen was hired to co-showrun Stumptown alongside Jason Richman. Naturally, that caused a delay of its own and while either the COVID delay or the showrunner swap delay would have been something that the network could have dealt with, cost-wise, the combination was what did Stumptown in.
Stumptown Is Still One of the Best Comics Adaptations and Detective Shows
The thing that really stings about Stumptown’s untimely demise is that the show really was that good. The ABC series managed to get all of the charm and nuance of the comic book series just right and bring it to the screen in a way that, if you knew the comics, you were thrilled but if you weren’t a comics fan you were equally as engaged. It was simply great television and it had so much potential. That potential is something that fans are reminded of pretty regularly these days thanks to the success of shows that came later. Series like Tracker and High Potential both are proof that Stumptown was onto something with the resurgence of this particular sort of detective drama, and their success just makes the loss of Stumptown sting even more.
Stumptown had goodogether in a really great series that, for 18 episodes, was one of the best shows on television. Unfortunately, the real world got in the way and we were robbed of what might have been. But if you ever get a chance to stream this gem of a series, do it. You won’t be disappointed
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