Amazon cancels teen thriller Panic after a single season

Sad news for Panic fans: Amazon Prime Video has officially canceled the teen thriller after just a single season.

Based on a popular YA novel by author Lauren Oliver, the series centers on the eponymous game known as Panic, an event in which each group of high school seniors in the small Texas town called Carp competes in a series of dangerous and occasionally life-threatening challenges that require them to face their deepest fears. If they stay calm, they win $50K and the chance to change their lives. If they panic, they lose.

The cast included Olivia Welch, Mike Faist, Jessica Sula, Camron Jones, Ray Nicholson, and Enrique Murciano.

True, the Amazon series sometimes featured paper-thin characters and required an almost Herculean ability to suspend your disbelief about precisely how a group of teens has managed to keep the occasionally deadly town a game secret for so long. But Panic understood that sometimes being fun to watch is more important than making sense, and kept pushing its story to ever more ridiculous heights.

On the plus side, though the ending of season 1 hints at an even more ridiculous mess to come, it does at least wrap up the story of Heather, Ray, and the rest of her classmates’ game. So, while it’s a shame that the series won’t continue – personally, I’d have loved to see what happened when the show got a chance to go off-book, so to speak since the novel doesn’t have a sequel – at least the first season feels relatively complete on its own.

Perhaps there’s just only so much room for YA-based series on Amazon at present. The streamer already renewed the Lost-esque drama The Wilds for a second season, is launching a television version of the film I Know What You Did Last Summer later this year, and has an adaptation of Harlan Coben’s Shelter in the works.

Are you sad to see Panic come to an end? Sound off in the comments.