EXCLUSIVE: Lucky 13, the ABC sport present hosted by Shaquille O’Neal and Gina Rodriguez, won’t return for a second season after failing to strike it fortunate.
The sequence, created by the crew that developed Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and first revealed by Deadline, was extra of an acquisition than a conventional greenlight by ABC.
Under the weird greenlight mannequin, producer Studio 1 pre-funded Lucky 13 in return for a share of ABC’s promoting and product placement gross sales on the present.
The bother for Studio 1 was that Lucky 13‘s actual ad revenue fell well short of the producer’s projections, which Deadline understands had been independently verified.
This was regardless of the present changing into ABC’s most-watched summer season sequence premiere when it launched on the Disney-owned community in July with 2.7M viewers, beating CBS’s Big Brother. Lucky 13’s season finale was additionally ranked primary in its time interval.
Deadline understands that ABC was making constructive noises about renewing Lucky 13, however the temper music modified in current weeks. An ABC spokesperson confirmed that it might not be returning for a second season, however cautioned that ABC, alongside many different broadcast networks, hardly ever formally cancels unscripted reveals, as they’ll at all times return in some kind or iteration, very like ABC has performed with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Studio 1 is now restructuring its enterprise to guard the Lucky 13 mental property amid ABC’s resolution to not renew the present.
Studio 1 CEO Adrian Woolfe instructed Deadline, “We are within the technique of taking proactive protecting steps to restructure the Studio 1 enterprise and to unlock and defend the worth of the now-proven Lucky 13 IP.
“Rather than it being a direct commission, the unique commercial model on which the debut series was launched in the U.S. was underpinned by advertising revenues which given well-publicised market conditions regrettably, but unavoidably, fell acutely short of forecasts.”
Lucky 13 examined contestants’ information with 13 true-or-false trivia questions however with a twist: Just how properly do they know what they know … and, simply as importantly, how properly do they know what they don’t know? If they precisely predicted how efficiently they’ve answered 13 questions, they took house a $1M money jackpot.
Woolfe created the present and served as showrunner. Kevin Bacon was an government producer alongside Mark Wells, Glenn Coomber, Aaron Stone, Alastair Burlingham, Gary Raskin, David Schiff, Scott Henry, and GW Wright.
O’Neal government produced alongside Colin Smeeton and Michael Parris for his Jersey Legends Productions, whereas Gina Rodriguez government produced through her I Can & I Will Productions.