Amazon Prime Video has canceled Clean Slate, which was television legend Norman Lear‘s final completed project, after one season. Series stars Laverne Cox and George Wallace, as well as their fellow co-creator Dan Ewen, broke the news in a guest column on Deadline.
Clean Slate premiered on Prime Video on February 6; by “the end of March” it was canceled, the trio wrote. Cox, Wallace and Ewen called the series a “labor of love,” and a “seven-year effort” that “was gone in a puff of server exhaust.”
Perhaps a little bit of a shot there on how Amazon conducts its business.
It was Cox and Wallace who brought the show to Lear. Lear, the sitcom dynamo (for decades and decades), died in December 2023 at 101 years old. Lear was the comedy genius behind All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Amazon Prime Video with a request for comment on the cancellation news; we did not immediately hear back.
In its review, THR called Clean Slate a “warm, well-meaning and not especially funny comedy.”
Wallace played Harry Slate, the owner of the Slate Family Car Wash (get it? Clean Slate?) in Mobile, Alabama. After 23 years of estrangement, Harry is excited to welcome back the child “he thought was his sad, insecure son,” Daniel Fienberg wrote in his review. “Instead, he greets confident, generally happy Desiree (Laverne Cox), who has left behind a career in the New York City art world.”
The reunion doesn’t actually go down in the sort-of classic sitcom-y way one might expect.
“Harry is taken aback for maybe 30 seconds, accidentally misgenders his daughter one or twice. But then he’s fairly accepting, with the joke/twist being that he’s much more outraged to learn that Desiree is vegetarian,” Fienberg continued. “Archie Bunker, he is not.”
And All in the Family this was not.