Lance Reddick responds to Netflix cancelling ‘Resident Evil’ series after one season

It was announced last week the streaming platform would not be ordering a second season

Lance Reddick – one of the stars of Netflix‘s Resident Evil TV adaptation – has shared a video responding to the show’s axing, after it was announced earlier this month it had been cancelled after one season.

Loosely based on the horror video game series of the same name, the series’ first season premiered in July and starred Reddick along with Ella Balinska, Paola Núñez, Adeline Rudolph, Tamara Smart and Siena Agudong.

The show fared poorly among viewers, with a 26 per cent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and garnering an average user rating of 3.6 per cent on IMDb. Last Friday, Deadline reported that Netflix has decided not to order a second season of the show.

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In a video posted to Twitter on August 28, Reddick thanked those who were a part of the series while acknowledging its end. “As all of you are well aware by now, our show Resident Evil on Netflix has been canceled,” he said.

“The haters and the trolls notwithstanding, I want to give a special thank you to all the fans who watched the show, got what we were doing and really loved it, because there are a hell of a lot of you.”

Reddick went on to thank the series’ “fearless leaders” – showrunners Mary Leah Sutton and Andrew Dabb – along with his castmates, the production company Constantin Films and executives at Netflix who “believed” in the series. “We worked our asses off, we had a great time, and we made a hell of a show,” he concluded. “Thank you. Onward and upward.”

Taking place across two timelines, the series revolves around sisters Jade (Balinska) and Billie (Rudolph), who move to the manufactured corporate town New Raccoon City after their father (Reddick) is offered an executive position at bioweapon developers Umbrella Corporation. As they begin to uncover secrets, Reddick’s character coordinates the response to the outbreak of a bioweapon called T-virus.

In the show’s second timeline, set 14 years after the events of the first, there are less than 15million people on earth, surrounded by the six billion monsters who have been infected with the virus. Amid that backdrop, Balinska’s character struggles to survive as the Umbrella Corporation launches a manhunt to find her.

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In a three-star review of the show, NME declared that Resident Evil “hones in on the origins of a very timely new pandemic, and goes quite shamelessly for the discredited conspiracy dollar”. It continued: “So closely does the show mirror the concerns of the vaccine and lockdown sceptics of 2020 that producers missed a trick on the casting.”

Resident Evil marked the second TV adaptation of the video game series to appear on Netflix, after the animated Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness arrived on the platform last year to mixed reviews.

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