Mayim Bialik’s Sitcom Canceled By Fox
Mayim Bialik's sitcom, Call Me Kat, has been canceled after three seasons.
For many years now, Mayim Bialik has had a very unexpected career renaissance. After being a teen star thanks to Blossom, she became a household name to a new generation thanks to The Big Bang Theory, and she parlayed that success into being one of the rotating hosts for Jeopardy!. She also began headlining an unconventional comedy series on Fox called Call Me Kat, but Variety reports that the network has canceled the show after three seasons.
The show’s premise is certainly interesting: Mayim Bialik plays a professor fast approaching middle age and is keenly aware that she won’t be getting married anytime soon. Therefore, she decides to take the money that her parents had originally set aside to throw her a splashy wedding to change careers and open a cat cafe. In this way, her character was quite relatable to many people who (especially in recent years) ditched their previous career tracks in order to try something new.
At first, the show was certainly successful enough. With her former The Big Bang Theory costar Jim Parsons as executive producer, the show adapted a British series called Miranda into something that seemed fresh and new to American audiences with Bialik herself as an executive producer. After the show was renewed for two more seasons after its debut, it looked like it could become another of her long-running network sitcoms.
Why, then, did this quirky Mayim Bialik show get cut after establishing itself over three seasons? The only real reason given by a Fox spokesperson was that “the audience response to it was not as strong as we had hoped.” It doesn’t take much effort to read between the lines and see that this show was either not gaining as many viewers as Fox wanted, losing some of the viewers it started with, or perhaps both.
And while we doubt that his death is the primary reason for the show not getting renewed, it’s an open secret that Call Me Kat was never the same after the unexpected death of Leslie Jordan. For as funny as Mayim Bialik can be, much of the charm of the show came from her costars, such as Jordan. The loss of even a single part of a show’s main cast can dramatically shake a network’s confidence…after all, The Big Bang Theory only ended because Jim Parsons wanted to leave, and CBS thought the show would never be the same in his absence.
Now that her schedule is more clear, only time will tell if Mayim Bialik or any of the rest of the original cast will return for the upcoming The Big Bang Theory reunion on HBO Max. So far, it seems like the new show is going to rely on a new cast, but we imagine that, much like with How I Met Your Father, there will be room for cameo appearances from original stars such as Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco in this spinoff. Honestly, we’d love to see Bialik reunited on the big screen with Jim Parsons, both to see their popular characters get a proper onscreen send-off and to maybe get Bialik off Jeopardy! so that Ken Jennings can finally become the sole full-time host.
