Day 309: The Huge Waste of Potential in 'Pantheon'

Recently I watched a series I had never heard anybody talk about called 'Pantheon.' It flew largely under the radar because the publisher, AMC, did almost zero advertising for it, then decided to cancel the show after the last season was already finished. Yes, they finished the show, then cancelled it. It made no sense at all. The few fans it had were forced to wait for the second season, which for a while there was an indefinite wait. AMC finally released it several months after production was finished, long after the tiny amount of interest in the show had already petered out. Thankfully I found the show after all this drama was already over so I got to watch it all in one sitting without having to worry. I've seen the term 'streaming hell' thrown around to explain it's failed release. It's strange because other animated shows like 'Invincible' on Amazon Prime, or Netflix's giant catalogue of animation have seen a lot of success lately. 'Pantheon' falls perfectly into the thriller/action/sci-fi niche that so many of those shows try to perfect, leading one to question how on Earth AMC could have fumbled the bag so badly with such a promising IP.

The show is based on a series of short stories by Ken Liu, who is best known for translating 'The Three-Body Problem' by Cixin Liu, and focuses on uploading human minds to computers. With all this AI hype in the news, one might think that a modern take on uploaded humans with a solid foundation and a big animation budget would be impossible to screw up. You still can't even find it anywhere but AMC's walled in streaming service AMC+, which I had never heard a single person even mention before I found the show. It also has a crazy cast including Ron Livingston, Daniel Dae Kim, Rosemarie DeWitt, Paul Dano, Aaron Eckhart (two Batman villains!?), and several more. There's even a brief cameo with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Also Scoot McNairy, whose name I will never tire of. They must have spent a pretty penny on this show as a whole, all except for advertising. Usually things are the other way round. The producers spend all the budget on advertising and the quality tanks. Somehow they got it backwards this time and it's still a waste of potential.

I'm convinced the show would be really popular if they gave it a wider release, but AMC seems to be intent on keeping it locked in their walled garden forever. I have no idea what else they have in AMC+, but one show, no matter how good, will ever be worth a whole streaming service. At this point it would seem like the logical thing to do is just license the IP to other streaming services to recoup some of the losses. I guess their plan is to build up a large in-house catalogue like Netflix has. It's funny how similar to the old TV model streaming has become. Maybe something new will come along soon that aggregates all of it. Until of course enough players are involved and the shows all split up again. The entropic dissolution of monolith streaming services should be studied for future reference.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley