Allegiance is cancelled after just five episodes amid terrible ratings as NBC replaces it with The Slap

I'm surprised tho. What kind of rating could they possible need? I was beginning to love the series. ah menh...

 

Allegiance has been canned after just five episodes.

The spy drama did not even make it through its first season as NBC pulled the plug early, leaving eight full episodes remaining unaired.

A respectable 5million viewers tuned in to watch the pilot episode when the series debuted on February 5 of this year.

 

However the show clearly failed to hold audience attention with numbers slipping by 1.5million by the second episode.

When figures stagnated around the 3.5million mark for the following two episodes, the Network but it out of its misery before episode 5 had even aired. 

The show is an American remake of the Israeli series The Gordin Cell, which has since also been tailored into Russian and South Korean versions.

It tells to story of Alex O'Connor, a young idealistic CIA analyst specializing in Russian affairs, whose close-knit, affluent family is then split apart when it is revealed that his parents are covert Russian spies deactivated years ago. 

The Kremlin subsequently reactivates them and enlists them for a terror operation inside the US border. 

NBC is reshuffling the series it has surrounding its tentpole show Blacklist, the James Spader thriller which occupies Thurday's prime 9/8c slot.

The Slap, the eight episode miniseries which tells the story of what happens when a father hits a neighboring parent's misbehaving child, is being moved from its 8/7c slot to replace Allegiance at 10/9c. 

Meanwhile 'Dateline: The Real Blacklist', hosted by NBC News’ Richard Engel and focusing on real-life conspiracy-themed investigations, will be broadcast beforehand.

The Slap, based on an Australian miniseries which was in turn based on a novel of the same name, has not being doing much better than Allegiance in the ratings. It debuted at 5.1million viewers but like the spy drama slipped to and then stayed at around 3.5million from episode two onwards.

Both shows started at a 1.1 demo rating - meaning they were reaching 1.1% of their intended demographic who have TVs - and both subsequently fell to 0.8.

Allegiance, which starred Hope Davis, Gavin Stenhouse and Margarita Levieva, is just one of more than 60 series that have ended or been cancelled this season.