The Bondsman, Prime Video’s horror series starring Kevin Bacon, has been canceled, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The show debuted its first and only season via Prime Video on April 3 with eight episodes. During its first week, Bondsman landed at No. 9 Nielsen’s streaming charts for March 31-April 6 with 563 million minutes watched. However, it swiftly exited the charts and did not land in the Top 10 again.
Bacon stars as a former country music star and murdered bounty hunter, Hub Halloran, who gets a second shot at life when the Devil resurrects him to catch demons who have escaped from Hell. Jennifer Nettles, Damon Herriman, Beth Grant and Maxwell Jenkins also starred in the series.
THR‘s TV critic Angie Han commended Bacon’s performance in the show, complimenting his ability “to land the show’s humor with a well-timed grunt, and its emotions with the perfect hangdog expression… Such is his charisma that he’s nearly able to make this whole strange jumble of tones and tunes and supernatural gore sing, through sheer force of will.”
Han added, “Outside of Bacon’s performance, the horror dramedy is more of a mixed bag — fitfully amusing but rarely as funny or heartfelt or surprising as it wants to be, and never as memorable as its attention-grabbing premise might lead you to hope.”
Grainger David created the series and served as an executive producer alongside Jason Blum, Jeremy Gold, Chris Dickie, Chris McCumber, Bacon, Paul E. Shapiro and Erik Oleson, who is also showrunner. Erik Holmberg served as co-executive producer. The Bondsman hails from Blumhouse Television, Marker 96, CrimeThink Production Company and Amazon MGM Studios.
Oleson told THR that with Bondsman, he “wanted to write something that would be fun to watch, fun to make and fun to write.” When he learned that Bacon was “interested” in the show, “I was like, ‘Wait, I get to have Kevin Bacon hunting demons with Blumhouse? Yes please, I’m in!’”
“There are a lot of demon hunting shows; there’s tons of movies and things. It is a genre unto itself, right? But what makes our show a fun, unique and original ride is in the mash-up of combining that with the family dramedy, Appalachian noir, a country music story and, oh yeah, Kevin Bacon putting chainsaws through the faces of demons,” Oleson added. “Like all that mix makes it a fun, hopefully original ride. You really don’t know whether you’re going to laugh out loud, scream out loud, or look at whoever’s watching it with you on the couch and say, ‘What the fuck? That was fun!”
