When CBS announced that it was ending Kevin Can Wait after two seasons, it meant that the case of Donna Gable's murder had gone cold. This beloved family matriarch would just become another statistic, a character killed off with the guilty party gone unpunished. We'd never know how Donna perished. The truth died with Kevin Can Wait. This unexplained murder would end up as an unsolved case on Sitcom Forensic Files.

There will never be #JusticeForDonna.

I spent eight months investigating the mysterious death of this loving wife and mother, but that only brought more theories and more questions. This dark, twisted mystery had been opened, but never closed.

But today, CBS gave us the only little bit of justice we might ever get for the late Donna Gable. In an interview with Deadline, CBS EVP Thom Sherman said that in killing off Donna at the end of Season One “the show made a choice at the beginning of this year, we agreed to go along with it, and unfortunately the audience did not respond to it.”

With viewership declining in a post-Donna Gable era, CBS was forced to cancel the show.

“It was a strong show for us, it’s had a lot of decline this year, it was heading in the wrong direction, said CBS Entertainment president Kelly Kahl. "The numbers were going down as the year went on and looking forward, it didn’t look like a show that was going to be strong enough to anchor a night for us going forward.”



Did fans not respond well because of the lack of closure? Or did fans just not like the insultingly clunky writing around a major character's death and the blatant attempt to repackage King of Queens as a different show? If CBS knew fans weren't responding well to Donna's death, why didn't they write an episode that responsibly addressed what happened?



If anything, CBS just should have done better than explaining her death with a joke about a gym membership.

Unless this sitcom goes the way of Last Man Standing—and, good god, I hope it does—we'll never know the truth about Donna. But we can find solace in the fact that CBS knows it fucked this whole thing up.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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