Media outlets are reporting the USA Network have cancelled the Jason Bourne spinoff series Treadstone after one season.
The series explored the origin story and present-day actions of a CIA black ops program known as Treadstone, a cover operation that uses behaviour modification protocol to turn its agents into nearly unstoppable supherhuman assassins. We focus on sleeper agents across the globe as they’re mysteriously ‘awakened’ to resume their deadly missions.
Being based on a high-name property like Universal’s Bourne franchise, the drama was expensive to make for the network and whilst they had a streaming deal with Amazon Prime to get more eyes on the series, it wasn’t drawing enough viewership numbers in to sustain another season. It also seems to be more of an overall programming shift at the NBCU network, as it appears to be moving away from ongoing scripted series (due to the increasingly challenging times of cable networks trying to make scripted series work in a ad-supported cable business model) and more towards live and unscripted programming.
The Treadstone series starred Jeremy Irvine, Tracy Ifeachor, Omar Metwally, Han Hyo-joo, Brian J. Smith, Gabrielle Scharnitzky, Emilia Schüle, Michelle Forbes, Michael Gaston, Jung Woo Seo, Tess Haubrich, Patrick Fugit, Lee Jong-hyuk, Oliver Walker and Shruti Hassan.