Why FX Canceled Jeff Bridges' The Old Man

This "Old Man" is retiring early; FX's "The Old Man," a Jeff Bridges-led slow-burning thriller that earned heavy praise in its first season, will not be coming back for a third season. News of the show's cancellation broke in December 2024 via Deadline, leaving fans with a cliffhanger to nowhere after the series' sophomore season ended a few months earlier.

Based on a book by Edgar Award winner Thomas Perry, "The Old Man" followed the mysterious exploits of, well, an old man. The elder statesman in question, played by Bridges, was eventually revealed to be an ex-CIA operative with some unfinished business — and a reluctance to re-enter his bloody former profession. Season 1 of the show was understated yet propulsive, and it benefited from great performances and a tense, looming showdown between Bridges' Dan Chase and Harold Harper (John Lithgow), a leading counterintelligence official who has a history with Chase. "The Leftovers" and "NYPD Blue" star Amy Brenneman was the show's secret weapon as Zoe, a woman who is forced to hit the road with Chase when people start coming for him.

The show's second season delved deeper into an intricate plot involving Alia Shawkat's Emily, a potential triple-crosser who throughout the series is presented as Chase's daughter, an FBI agent, and an Afghanistan-based woman named Parwana. The truth about Emily's identity mostly comes to light in the second season, but the show ends without tying up several major loose ends — and before it ever shows Chase come fully out of retirement and reach his full butt-kicking potential.

According to both Deadline and Empire Online, "The Old Man" likely fizzled out due to the unusually long downtime between its initial announcement and its first and second seasons. The show began filming in 2019, aired its debut season in 2022, and wrapped up prematurely in 2024. Over the course of those five years, a pandemic, industry-wide strikes, and Bridges' cancer treatment all changed the series' production schedule. Each of these pauses was important, and Bridges thankfully entered remission in 2021. Nevertheless, circumstances outside the show's control led to a sizable gap between seasons 1 and 2, during which plenty of other great shows came and went, and Hollywood's economic landscape drastically changed.

"The Old Man" season 2 may not have had enough eyes on it to warrant a third outing, but the show still wrapped up with a handful of Emmy, Critics' Choice, and Screen Actors Guild nominations, and its first season broke viewership records for Hulu upon release. In the end, the show may have suffered from the problem that plagues so much prestige television; it felt like a limited series being pulled, as if on a medieval torture device meant to stretch one beyond their limits, into a multi-season drama. Reviews of the sophomore season were decidedly mixed, with The Guardian's Rachel Aroesti panning the show's "baffling plot and infuriating drip-feed of information" and a headline from The Daily Beast declaring that "'The Old Man' is already feeling geriatric — and it's only season 2."

With "The Old Man" done and dusted, its stars have already moved on to other projects. Alia Shawkat can be seen in the most recent seasons of "Severance" and "Poker Face," while Jeff Bridges will return to a cinematic cyberworld with "Tron: Ares," and John Lithgow is set to play Albus Dumbledore in the upcoming "Harry Potter" TV show.