NBC has cancelled nine television series as it reshapes its lineup for the 2026-27 broadcasting season, including a comedy that earned a 96 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a first-year medical drama, a crime thriller in its second season, one of the longest-running spinoffs in the Law and Order franchise and, most unexpectedly, Access Hollywood, the celebrity entertainment news program that has been on the air for thirty seasons since 1996.
The list of cancellations spans nearly every category of network television, scripted drama, comedy, talk shows, daytime programming, and reflects a strategy shift that NBC executives have been signaling for months.
The network intends to lean heavily on live sports content for the coming broadcast year, and the scripted and talk show programming that occupied time slots the network believes sports can fill more profitably is being cleared out to make room.
Jeff Bader, NBCUniversal's President of Program Planning Strategy, described the overall direction bluntly when discussing one of the cancelled shows last month. "We're looking for places where we can grow the network. Nothing negative about the show, but for our linear schedule, we absolutely need to try and do a little bit better there."
The nine cancelled shows are Stumble, Brilliant Minds, The Hunting Party, Law and Order: Organized Crime, The Copenhagen Test, Suits LA, Access Hollywood, Karamo and The Steve Wilkos Show.
Stumble And The Rotten Tomatoes Problem
The cancellation that has generated the most immediate discussion is Stumble, a first-season NBC comedy that earned a 96 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a figure that would make it one of the best-reviewed comedies on broadcast television in recent years. Critics and the audiences who found the show loved it. The linear ratings on NBC were not sufficient to justify a second season.
This specific pattern, a show with strong critical and audience reception that cannot survive on broadcast television's legacy ratings model, has become one of the defining stories of the streaming era.
The people who watch Stumble may watch it on Peacock after the broadcast, may watch it days later on their DVR, may binge the season after it completes rather than watching week to week. None of those viewing patterns contribute to the Nielsen numbers that determine whether a broadcast network renews a show.
The 96 percent audience score reflects genuine enthusiasm from people who watched. The renewal decision reflects the number of people who watched it on NBC's linear channel at the time it aired.
The gap between those two measurements is the specific structural problem that broadcast networks have been unable to solve since streaming reorganized how people watch television.
Stumble ended after one season with a Rotten Tomatoes score that most network comedies never approach.
Brilliant Minds, a medical drama that debuted in the 2025-26 season, was also cancelled after its first year, ending before it had the opportunity to build the audience that medical dramas sometimes require multiple seasons to develop.
The Hunting Party And The Franchise Question
The Hunting Party ran for two seasons on NBC, starring Melissa Roxburgh as an FBI special agent leading a team to track down criminals.
Universal Television, the studio that produced the series, is reportedly seeking another network or streaming service to continue the show, the standard procedure for a cancelled series with an audience that believes it deserved more time.
Jeff Bader's comments about The Hunting Party at the time of its cancellation, that the network had considered both a third broadcast season and a Peacock continuation before ultimately declining both, indicate the show's situation was evaluated through multiple lenses rather than dismissed immediately. The decision reflected numbers and available scheduling options rather than a judgment about the show's quality.
Law and Order: Organized Crime ended after five seasons, a longer run than Hunting Party, Stumble or Brilliant Minds, and the kind of exit that reflects a show that ran its natural course rather than being abruptly cut.
The spinoff from Law and Order: SVU centered on detective Elliot Stabler, played by Christopher Meloni, who had left SVU after eleven seasons before returning in this context. Five seasons was a substantial run for what began as a character-specific spinoff. The Organized Crime franchise ends as the parent Law and Order series continues.
Access Hollywood And What Its Cancellation Means
The cancellation that marks the most significant end of an era in NBC's 2026 decisions is Access Hollywood.
The entertainment news program that premiered in 1996, thirty years ago, has been a fixture of syndicated television across that entire span, reporting on celebrity news, red carpet events, awards shows and entertainment industry stories for three decades. Both Access Hollywood and its companion program Access Daily were cancelled together in March.
Entertainment journalism as a broadcast syndicated product has been under pressure for years from the same forces that have restructured how all television journalism works, digital outlets, social media, streaming and the fragmentation of the audience that once watched Access Hollywood because it was the most accessible way to get celebrity news on a screen.
In 2026, celebrity news is everywhere, instantly and continuously. The specific form that Access Hollywood represented, the produced, packaged, network-branded entertainment news magazine, has been losing its distinctiveness relative to alternatives that are faster, cheaper and more interactive.
Thirty seasons is an extraordinary run for any television program. Access Hollywood outlasted dozens of competitors in the entertainment news space and survived every major restructuring of the television landscape between 1996 and 2026.
Its cancellation nonetheless marks the end of a specific kind of celebrity journalism that shaped how a generation of Americans processed entertainment culture.
The Talk Show Clean-Out
The cancellation of Karamo and The Steve Wilkos Show alongside Access Hollywood represents a broader withdrawal from daytime and syndicated talk show programming at NBC's Universal Television.
Both shows occupied the specific niche of personality-driven daytime content that has been struggling to find an audience as the daytime television viewing habits of prior generations have not been replicated by younger audiences.
Karamo, hosted by Karamo Brown, known to television audiences as the culture expert on Queer Eye, ran for four seasons.
Brown had also recently stepped back from Queer Eye, suggesting a broader reassessment of his television commitments rather than simply a show cancellation.
The Steve Wilkos Show, hosted by former Jerry Springer director of security Steve Wilkos, ran for nineteen seasons, a remarkable longevity for a show that existed in the tabloid talk show tradition.
The Kelly Clarkson Show represents a different kind of departure from NBC's daytime lineup. Clarkson chose to end the show after seven seasons to spend more time with her children, a decision that was voluntary on the host's part rather than a network cancellation, but that contributes to the overall restructuring of what NBC's daytime and syndicated presence looks like heading into 2026-27.
The Strategy Underneath The Cancellations
The nine cancellations are not independent decisions about individual shows, they are components of a coherent strategy that NBC has been executing throughout the 2025-26 season.
The network's programming leadership has been explicit that live sports content represents the most valuable use of broadcast network time slots in the current television environment. Sports deliver the live, appointment viewing that streaming cannot easily replicate. Sports attract advertising at premium rates. Sports create the shared cultural moments that social media amplifies in ways that benefit the network.
The shows that have been cancelled occupied time periods that the network believes sports coverage, reality programming or other event content can use more efficiently. Bader's language, "we need to try and do a little bit better there," is the specific framing of a network that is measuring the opportunity cost of scripted drama in a sports-dominated competitive environment and concluding that the trade is unfavorable.
Chicago Fire, Chicago Med and Chicago P.D., the One Chicago franchise that has been the backbone of NBC's scripted Thursday programming for years, were all renewed, confirming that the network is not abandoning scripted drama entirely but is concentrating its scripted investment in proven franchises with established audiences rather than continuing to develop new shows at the scale of previous years.