Sci-Fi Storm

CBS just announced that it will not order a fourth season of summer series Under The Dome.

The show, which is generally credited with making the summer TV season a potential ratings boom (and with it, advertising dollars), debuted in June of 2013 with nearly 18 million viewers (Live+7), outdoing all but one of the fall debuts in 2012. But with various plot twists over three seasons it shed viewers pretty quickly. It proved a strong performer for streaming services via Amazon, and will continue to be available there.

It is almost certain that CBS will renew Zoo, and it is believed that with Under The Dome out of the way, Extant has a stronger chance at renewal as well.

CBS has already given a second season order for the Stephen King summer series Under The Dome, announced today at their Television Critics Association presentation. Stephen King himself will pen the second season premiere episode.

The show premiered to a 4.6 Live+7 rating in the 18-49 demos and has been relatively stable since. It also shows on [asin=B00DAHSY58]Amazon[/asin] only 4 days after the network premiere, free to Amazon Prime subscribers (not a subscriber? Try a 30-day free trial.)

Some more casting news this week: Rachelle Lefevre (Twilight) is joining the cast of Under The Dome from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Stephen King, based on a novel by King. She will play Julia, who recently moved from Chicago to Chester’s Mill with her husband and is an investigative journalist.

Amazon Studios has added Kirk Ward (Forrest Gump, The Island) to its pilot for Zombieland, based on the movie. Zombieland is among several projects from Amazon that hopes to break the network broadcast model of television, along with competitors Netflix, Hulu and others that are trying the direct sales/download model.

More news for CBS’s upcoming Under The Dome series from Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. Today it was announced that Mike Vogel (Pan Am, Cloverfield) would take the reins as the lead in the show, wrapping up the principal cast.

Update: Apparently they aren’t done yet…Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris has been signed to play Chester’s Mill councilman and used car salesman Big Jim.

Amazon struck a deal with CBS to allow online streaming of the upcoming summer series Under The Dome, from Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, just 4 days after the initial airing on CBS. Amazon Prime members exclusively will be able to stream the show an unlimited number of times.

Why four days? Because currently networks sell commercial slots to advertisers based on the “C3” rating – which counts the number of viewers who watch the commercials played during the broadcast, both live and time-shifted up to three days. After the third day it doesn’t matter much to the network, so this is likely the soonest you’ll see digital distribution done by anyone other than the broadcast network for a show.

CBS has announced that actors Natalie Martinez (CSI: NY) and newcomer Alex Koch have been signed to star in the 13-episode straight-to-series Under The Dome, which is being produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television and is based on a novel by Stephen King.

The series, set to air this summer, is about a small New England town that suddenly finds itself cut off from the rest of the world by a dome, and must learn to survive in post-apocalyptic conditions while trying to discover where they dome came from, and why.