The love story between Dana and Peter will be ending much sooner than expected. ABC’s Manhattan Love Story is the first show of the 2014 Fall season to get cancelled.
Manhattan ran just four episodes before ABC finally decided to end its misery. The network just couldn’t take another week with this show as the lead-in to Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD on Tuesdays.
As Entertainment Weekly notes, the show’s last episode only had 2.6 million viewers and an anemic 0.7 18-49 rating. By comparison, the show that airs before it, Selfie drew 3.8 million viewers and a 1.1 rating in the key demographic.
Manhattan and Selfie were the only new sitcoms on the network that did not get expanded season orders. ABC has at least found success with Anthony Anderson’s Black-ish, while on the drama side, freshman How To Get Away With Murder has also been a hit.
Analeigh Tipton and Jake McDorman starred as the couple on Manhattan. The show’s hook was that the audience heard what was in their heads as they met. While it’s an interesting concept, the show quickly fell into rom-com cliches, with the most recent episode centering on their decision to finally have sex.
The most astonishing aspect of Manhattan’s cancellation is that it came in late October and is still the first cancellation of the season. The networks have been noticeably patient with shows this year, probably because they don’t have much else to replace them with at this point.