Fox has canceled Going Dutch after two seasons, and while that's unfortunate for fans of Denis Leary, it's really just the latest casualty in the slow death of network comedy.
The show, which starred Leary as a military colonel navigating bureaucracy at a small Army base in the Netherlands, had a solid premise and a charismatic lead. But solid and charismatic aren't enough anymore when you're competing with the infinite scroll of streaming content.
Deadline reports that the cancellation came despite respectable ratings—or at least, what counts as respectable in the increasingly dire landscape of broadcast television. The show averaged around 2 million viewers per episode, which would've been a disaster in 2005 but is practically a hit in 2026.
The real story here isn't Going Dutch specifically. It's that network television has lost the cultural war. Streaming has trained audiences to expect prestige production values, binge-worthy narratives, and freedom from commercial interruption. Network comedies, constrained by 22-minute episodes and advertiser sensitivities, feel increasingly quaint.
Leary previously anchored Rescue Me for seven seasons on FX, proving he can carry a show. But FX in the 2000s gave him creative freedom that broadcast networks simply can't match. Going Dutch felt like a throwback to an earlier era of TV comedy—episodic, moderately clever, inoffensive enough for family viewing.
Which is exactly the problem. In 2026, "moderately clever" doesn't cut it. Audiences want either laugh-out-loud funny or they want prestige drama masquerading as comedy (see: The Bear). The middle ground where Going Dutch lived has become a graveyard.
Fox still has The Simpsons and Bob's Burgers, but those are animated institutions. Live-action sitcoms on network TV are approaching endangered species status. In Hollywood, nobody knows anything—except that broadcast comedy's glory days are long behind us.
