The Old Man Canceled At FX And Disney+ After 2 Seasons

2024 has been a brutal year for streaming series being cancelled, with everything from The Acolyte to KAOS to Dead Boy Detectives feeling the steel of the axe over the past twelve months. It's been so brutal, we wrote a whole piece about it — which you can find here. But while we might've hoped we'd seen the last of the year's cancellations as 2025 rapidly approaches, it simply wasn't to be. Per Deadline's reporting, FX and Disney+'s Jeff Bridges led series The Old Man is the latest victim of the content cull and has been dropped after just two seasons.

Created by Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg, and based on Thomas Perry’s 2017 bestseller of the same name, the show — which co-starred John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman and Alia Shawkat — followed Dan Chase (Bridges), a former CIA man whose off-grid existence is disrupted when his past life catches up with him. By turns pulpy and poignant, the series built a following and garnered praise for its character-driven storytelling, slick action, and Jeff Bridges' towering lead performance. In fact, the series' quality was never in question. Rather, it was a slew of uncontrollable external forces that conspired against The Old Man. Namely, a pandemic midway through shooting the first season in 2019; star Bridges needing to undergo cancer treatment later that same year; and then, after gaining a well-earned Season 2 renewal, the months-long WGA strikes. These factors all led to just 15 episodes being made in half a decade — a real plug puller in an era where the content stream flows fast and carries precious little long distance.

Still, despite the fact our man Dan's chase is prematurely over, the show at least went out as it started — with high-octane action, more twists than a French pastry, Bridges writing action cheques and astounding with the way his body cashes them, and a whole tonne of family drama unspooling before our eyes. We may never find out what awaited Dan Chase and his daughter Emily (Shawkat) on the other side of the 5-0 pulling up and surrounding them at that diner, but as The Old Man is laid to rest, we'll remember a properly great show, cut off in its prime, that deserved another season.