Shemar Moore Is Calling Out CBS For Canceling His Show “S.W.A.T.” (UPDATE)
UPDATE: The power of Shemar Moore knows no bounds. Because CBS has taken back its cancelation of S.W.A.T., and the show will get a seventh and final season.
For the past thirty years, Shemar Moore has made a career out of being beautiful with a few moments of acting sprinkled in between. And since 2017, Shemar has been running, jumping, and rolling for a check on the popular CBS series S.W.A.T., where he is one of the few Black male actors leading an entire broadcast series. But unfortunately, Shemar must not have done enough bare-chested barrel rolls through pyrotechnics to ensure S.W.A.T. stays on the air since its sixth season will be its last. And Shemar has a few parting words before his show gets relegated to TNT reruns because he believes canceling S.W.A.T. is a big mistake.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Shemar took his gripes over to Instagram to tell everybody CBS got it wrong by canceling S.W.A.T. since the show continues to be a hit for the network and its ratings has been rising lately.
“It makes no sense,” Moore said of the cancellation in an Instagram video posted Saturday. “We’ve done nothing wrong. We did everything that was asked for.”
Moore praised the show’s ratings over the past two years and emphasized its strong performance on Friday nights. The Criminal Minds alum also stated that he is the only African American male lead on broadcast television, not including streaming or cable, and pointed out that Chris O’Donnell, not LL Cool J, was No. 1 on the call sheet for NCIS: Los Angeles, which is also ending its run this month on CBS.
Shemar also claimed that during talks with CBS executives, they one hundred percent informed him SWAT would go on, and nobody’s jobs were in jeopardy. Oh, Sexy Shemar, you’ve been privileged in the beauty and inclusion department for too long because you failed to read between the lines. Whenever someone tells you your job is safe…that means your job ain’t safe. And the confusion as to why he was being treated like a regular person instead of the sexual adonis he’s grown accustomed to perplexed him so much that he felt he needed to speak on it further.
“I will be fine, but I’m upset because I busted my whole entire ass to prove that I could do this, and I did prove that I could do this,” he said. “I understand it’s not personal — it’s business — but I still have faith that SWAT will live to see another day. So I’m asking my homies, my fans and my baby girls, and the rest of the world who follow me or follow the show, follow the cast, my brothers and my sisters: Make some fucking noise. And let them know that canceling SWAT is a fucking mistake.”
Deadline adds that S.W.A.T. is co-produced by CBS Studios and Sony Pictures TV, and the show got canned because of money issues between both sides:
That is because CBS and lead studio Sony TV could not come to a financial agreement, I hear. As Deadline reported in March, those early renewals the last few years had come with the network keeping the license fee unchanged, which had put more and more pressure on the budget and further squeezed the show’s profit margins since costs of producing TV shows increase every year. Sony was not willing to go for another renewal at a flat license fee as that would compromise the show’s financial model.
I hear CBS, who let its exclusive window on S.W.A.T. expire, eventually went up on the license fee but the offer came with a cut of the order, which would’ve pushed up the per-episode budget even higher and further hurt the show’s economics. The two sides were in negotiations til the end but the gap between them remained, leading to today’s cancellation. (From what I hear, finding a new home for S.W.A.T. elsewhere appears unfeasible. Unlike studios behind other series, like Universal TV’s Magnum PI, which successfully moved the drama from CBS to NBCU
Even though S.W.A.T. was a hit for CBS, they probably didn’t see it that way since, after six seasons, it was never spun off into different series set in different cities, like all their other shows. Speaking of, now that CBS has a spot to fill in its schedule, prepare yourself for CSI: Poughkeepsie or NCIS: South Padre Island.
Pic: INSTARImages