Prime Video cancelled “Spider-Noir” on Thursday. On Friday the Creative Arts Emmys opened, and the show walked in carrying eleven nominations, more than any other Prime Video title this year. Nobody planned that sequence, and it is still hard to look at. A streamer retired its most decorated series of the year roughly twenty four hours before that series turned up to collect its awards. The people who walk the stage this weekend on its behalf now do so for a show with no future.
The rest of the numbers do not obviously add up to a cancellation either. Eight episodes, premiering 25 May on MGM+ and 27 May on Prime Video. Ninety two percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 112 reviews, and ninety percent with audiences. Three months and change later it is finished, with no second season, no announced plan to shop it anywhere else, and no explanation from Prime Video as to why. Nicolas Cage played Ben Reilly, a down-on-his-luck private investigator working 1930s New York as the city’s only costumed hero, in what was the actor’s first regular television role. It lasted exactly one season, and by every published measure of quality it lasted it extremely well.
A streamer retired its most decorated series of the year roughly twenty four hours before that series turned up to collect its awards.”
It is worth reading the nomination list in full, because the shape of it explains more than the total does. Outstanding Cinematography For A Series. Outstanding Production Design For A Narrative Period Or Fantasy Program. Outstanding Title Design. Sound Mixing and Sound Editing. Outstanding Special Visual Effects In A Single Episode. Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup. Music Composition and Original Music And Lyrics. Stunt Performance and Stunt Coordination. That is eleven nominations, and every single one of them is a craft category.
There is nothing there for acting, nothing for writing, nothing for directing, and nothing for Cage himself. That is not really a snub, it is closer to a diagnosis. The Television Academy looked at “Spider-Noir” and rewarded, comprehensively and across eleven separate branches, how the thing was made: the way it was lit, dressed, scored, mixed, made up and thrown down a flight of stairs. What it did not do was nominate the series for what it was about. That distinction turns out to be the entire story, because making it that way is precisely what made it impossible to keep.
The premise was a hard-boiled detective picture with a Spider-Man inside it, and the reviews were not lukewarm. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics consensus reads: “Nicolas Cage delivers a gloriously pulpy performance that makes every quip and thwip crackle in Spider-Noir, a dazzling, stylish blend of hard-boiled storytelling and pure comic book verve.” Ninety two percent from 112 critics, with a ninety percent audience score sitting underneath it, is not a cult reception or a passionate minority. On paper it is a hit, by most of the measures a network points at when it wants to look successful.
Every measure except the one that actually pays. Reporting around the cancellation is consistent on this point: “Spider-Noir” fell off Prime Video’s daily top ten noticeably faster than the platform’s other recent originals, and its viewership has been characterised as respectable rather than outsized. It was watched. It was not devoured. In a subscription business the difference between those two verbs is the difference between a renewal and a press release, and no amount of critical goodwill closes that gap on its own. There is a wrinkle worth flagging here as well. The series went out on MGM+ on 25 May and only reached Prime Video on 27 May, so its audience was split across two Amazon-owned services from the opening weekend onward. A show being judged on one platform’s daily chart, having launched on a different one two days earlier, is not a show being measured cleanly, and that is before anyone accounts for the people who waited to watch the whole thing in black and white.
Then there is what it cost, which is where the two halves of this story finally meet. The production effectively delivered the series twice, finishing both a full colour version and a genuine black and white one so that subscribers could pick which “Spider-Noir” they wanted to watch. It is the most on-brand decision the show could possibly have made and it is also an accountant’s worst afternoon. Every dollar of the craft the Academy has just nominated eleven times lives inside choices like that one, and a lavish period New York built twice over is a very expensive way to be admired.
Which makes the cancellation coherent and dispiriting at the same time. The show was created by Oren Uziel and produced by Amy Pascal’s Pascal Pictures and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Lord Miller, alongside Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios, a roster that reads like a company betting seriously on something. Around Cage it assembled Lamorne Morris as Joe “Robbie” Robertson, Li Jun Li as Cat Hardy, Brendan Gleeson as Finn “Silvermane” Byrne, Jack Huston as Flint Marko, Abraham Popoola as Lonnie Lincoln and Karen Rodriguez as Janet Ruiz. That is not a cheap cast, and it was not asked back.
The one genuinely encouraging note is that this does not look like Amazon backing away from the wider relationship. Prime Video is reported to be eyeing a greenlight for another series drawn from Sony’s universe of Marvel characters, with the partnership between the two companies carrying on. The lesson the streamer has taken is apparently about this show’s economics rather than about Marvel characters in general, which will be cold comfort to anyone who spent eight episodes in this version of New York.
What happens over the next ten days is going to be genuinely strange to watch. The Creative Arts Emmys run across Friday and Saturday, with the main ceremony on 14 September, and “Spider-Noir” is live in eleven races it might well win. Awards exist partly to tell an industry what to make more of. This particular set will be handed out to a production that was shut down the day before the envelopes started opening, which is either a very pointed piece of scheduling or a reminder that the two systems are not talking to each other at all.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that nothing here went wrong exactly. The show was good, the reviews said so, the Academy agreed eleven times over, and it still could not justify its own budget against the number of people who watched it. That is not a failure of taste, it is what happens when the thing everybody praises and the thing that pays for it are two different things. “Spider-Noir” got made, got seen, got nominated and got cancelled, in that order, inside four months. Go and watch it in black and white while it is still there.
What Do You Think? Does eleven Emmy nominations mean anything at all if it cannot buy a second season, or is that just proof that awards and audiences were never measuring the same thing? Should Sony take “Spider-Noir” somewhere else rather than let a finished, acclaimed show sit dead on a shelf? And did the black and white version turn out to be the point of the whole thing, or the indulgence that quietly killed it?
See you on the next binge!
