Why was New Amsterdam Season 6 Canceled? Explained

By Kieran Burt
Published: March 9, 2023
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Why was New Amsterdam Season 6 canceled? This article discusses whether the show was canceled and the reasons why.

New Amsterdam is a medical drama that ran for five seasons on the NBC Network and followed Dr. Max Goodwin, played by Ryan Eggold, as he becomes the medical director at the New Amsterdam Medical Centre, the oldest public hospital in the USA. Goodwin believes every patient deserves expert medical attention and fights against the awful public health system. This helped it to care a difference for itself, as this side of things isn’t often touched in other medical dramas.

But, even this refreshing take on the medical drama world wasn’t enough to keep the New Amsterdam Medical Centre open, as on March 2022, Deadline revealed the show had been canceled. Now that season five has come out; fans are asking why this drama got shuttered.

Is New Amsterdam finished?

New Amsterdam has indeed finished, with its fifth season ending on January 17, 2023; the show itself has also been canceled, meaning that there won’t be season six anytime in the future. Unfortunately for fans, there will be no more seasons of New Amsterdam in 2023 or at all.

This was first reported by Deadline in March 2022. At the time, the show was praised by Erin Underhill, the President of Universal Television, as she said, “When I first read the pilot script for New Amsterdam, I knew we had a winner. We cheered Max’s disruption of the status quo and applauded when he asked his patients the simple yet profound question, ‘How can I help?’.”

The show was released on NBC, a network owned by Universal. This means that viewers can rewatch the show anytime they want on Peacock, the streaming service owned by the company.

Why was New Amsterdam Season 6 canceled?

The main reason New Amsterdam was canceled was a fall in ratings. They slipped and are below most of the more established NBC dramas, which given the cost of the show, makes for a challenging pill to swallow for the studio.

Viewership numbers for the show also fell with each season. When the pilot was released in 2018, it attracted a healthy 14 million viewers. But by the time season five finished five years later, this had declined by almost two-thirds, to 5.2 million. Ratings experienced a similar drop, starting at 1.8 for the pilot episode, 0.9 for the season one finale, and by the time the season 5 finale rolled around, the show had a rating of 0.3.

Stiff competition likely compounded these problems. Grey’s Anatomy is still going strong after nearly 20 seasons and three upcoming spin-offs, and The Resident is maintaining its rating of 1.0 even after six seasons and is aiming for a seventh.

Why is New Amsterdam ending after Season 5?

New Amsterdam season five was renewed for a final season in 2023, but because of a steep decline in viewership and ratings and tough competition, the show was forced to end.

The fluctuating episode count is a likely contributing factor to the decline in its audience and ratings. Seasons one and four had 22 episodes, and season two only had 18 episodes, which went down to 14 for season three. Season five has the lowest amount of episodes out of the lot, with only 13 episodes.

This lack of consistency probably didn’t help with retaining audiences.

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