Whilst this week brought an update on where things lie with the new Friday the 13th movie, now comes some news on the future of The CW’s long-mooted Friday the 13th TV series.

Speaking at the network’s TCA presentation, The CW’s Mark Pedowitz has confirmed that this planned new show has actually been axed before it even really got going.

Pedowitz confirmed, “The bottom line is we felt we had stronger things to go with, and we didn’t go forward with it. It was well-written, it was darker than we wanted it to be, and we didn’t believe it had sustainability… We didn’t believe that it was a sustainable script, a sustainable series. It was a very good pilot, but not a sustainable series.”

The plan for this now-canned show was for it to exist in a world where the events of the Friday the 13th movie franchise were actually based on true events. The series would then explore the real story of Jason Voorhees and Camp Crystal Lake.

Whilst we’ve absolutely loved horror franchise-based shows like Bates Motel and Hannibal in recent years, it doesn’t particularly pain us to hear this series has been scrapped already. We love Jason, we really, really do, but he’s one of those horror icons where part of his charm relies on him just being a driven brute of a man out for some form of vengeance for what was done to him and his mother. Seeing the “real story” of what happened and how things were fleshed out for the young Jason and his family, that just doesn’t seem like it would work for the character. For Norman Bates in Bates Motel, it’s worked fantastically well, but the feeling here is that the planned approach for this Friday the 13th TV series would’ve likely seen it suffer the same fate as Damien… which was cancelled after just one season.

Then again, what do we know, for the new Friday the 13th movie is actually going to explore the backstory and family life of young Jason and his parents. Right…