Amazon cancels its Kevin Bacon-starring supernatural crime show The Bondsman after just one season

Amazon has canceled the Kevin Bacon-starring streaming series The Bondsman after just one season, as reported by Variety.

Bacon played the eponymous Bondsman in the show, which released all eight episodes of its first season on Amazon back in April. But rather than being a simple bondsman hunting down criminals who have skipped out on bail, Bacon's Hub Halloran was a resurrected spirit sent back to Earth to track down condemned souls that escaped from Hell.

"Murdered bounty hunter Hub Halloran (Bacon) is resurrected by the Devil to trap and send back demons that have escaped from the prison of Hell," reads the show's official description.
"By chasing down those demons with the help and hindrance of his estranged family, Hub learns how his own sins got his soul condemned - which pushes him to seek a second chance at life, love, and country music."

The show was created by Grainger David for Blumhouse Television, with David, Bacon, Erik Oleson, and Blumhouse head Jason Blum serving as executive producers.

It's a bit hard not to notice the apparently coincidental similarities between the premise of The Bondsman and that of another in-development Blumhouse property, King Spawn, a planned film reboot of the comic book Spawn.

In Spawn, one of the longest-running independent comics of all time, dead man Al Simmons is tricked into returning to Earth to claim souls for the devil while also trying to piece together the mystery of the circumstances surrounding his death and navigating his relationships with his still living family members.

The idea of a dead person returning to Earth to harvest souls for the devil isn't entirely new, but perhaps that's why The Bondsman didn't manage to resurrect itself for a second season - it's not fresh enough to carry on.

Whatever the reasons behind the cancellation, The Bondsman did in fact make our list of the 25 best Amazon shows to watch right now.