CBS has canceled Poppa’s House and The Summit after just one season apiece.
Poppa’s House brought Damon Wayans (My Wife and Kids, The Last Boy Scout) and his son Damon Wayans Jr. (New Girl, The Other Guys) together. The senior Wayans played talk-radio host “Poppa” who “has his point of view challenged at work when a new female co-host is hired, and at home where he finds himself still parenting his adult son, a brilliant dreamer who is trying to pursue his passion while being a responsible father and husband,” as the logline reads.
Wayans Jr. played Junior, Essence Atkins played Ivy, Poppa’s new co-host, and Tetona Jackson played Nina, Junior’s wife; Poppa’s House was produced by CBS Studios.
Reality competition The Summit set 16 strangers on a journey through the New Zealand Alps in an attempt to reach the peak of a distant, giant mountain within just two weeks. There was danger at every turn and an equal share of $1 million in everyone’s backpacks — the full prize went to the winner.
The Summit was hosted by Manu Bannett and produced by Endemol Shine North America. Executive producers were Kevin Lee, Tina Nicotera and Endemol Shine North America’s Sharon Levy and Michael Heyerman. The series is based on a format by Endemol Shine Australia and Nine.
CBS taketh away, and CBS giveth. Also on Tuesday, CBS ordered one-hour drama Einstein and single-cam comedy DMV to series. And earlier in the day, CBS ordered FBI spinoff CIA to series for the fall. CIA will be set in the same fictional world as FBI but centering on the Central Intelligence Agency. Tom Ellis (Lucifer, Tell Me Lies) will star in the series, which like FBI comes from Universal Television, Dick Wolf’s Wolf Entertainment and CBS Studios. The series order for CIA means Wolf will continue to have multiple series at CBS in the 2025-26 season.
CIA was initially intended as a planted spinoff of FBI (with an alphabet-soup working title of FBI: CIA), with characters set to be introduced in an episode of the parent series near the end of its current season. CBS and the show’s producers opted not to go that route, however, and moved to trying to secure a straight-to-series pickup. They were successful.
