Wes Chatham, Steven Strait, Cas Anvar, and Dominique Tipper star in The Expanse (Picture: Amazon)

The Expanse returns for a fourth season on a new home with Amazon, but the path from cancellation hasn’t been an easy ride.

Based on the book series by James S. A. Corey (the joint pen names of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), The Expanse is a rich, complex sci-fi series set 200 years in the future where humanity has colonised the solar system.

The first three seasons earned critical acclaim and famous fans in Game Of Thrones creator George RR Martin, but original broadcaster Syfy cancelled the show on financial grounds in May 2018 – sparking fan outcry and online petitions of the likes which proved successful for Lucifer and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.



For Cas Anvar, who plays Alex Kamal in The Expanse, the show’s sudden end came as a surprise, although he now sees it as a ‘blessing in disguise’ heading into season four.


Speaking to Metro.co.uk, Cas said: ‘It was very surreal, very euphoric. I’ve never been through anything like this where we grew as a family for three years, we fell in love with the project, we fell in love with the show, the team and each other.

‘Season three was getting critical acclaim, so the last thing we ever expected was to be let go and not able to finish our story.

‘It’s literally like being in the middle of a story on the phone and the line going dead. You don’t get to finish the conversation. That’s how it felt emotionally to a lot of us. We had to let it go.’

In the aftermath of the cancellation, Cas connected with a group of super fans who were petitioning to save The Expanse; helping to steer them in the right direction by encouraging a campaign to watch the show live to boost ratings.

‘The showrunner Naren Shankar said I was like the tip of the spear and fans were the muscle,’ Cas said.

Chrisjen is back in the fourth season (Picture: Amazon)

‘People take for granted sometimes when a really good show is about to disappear. They think, “Oh someone’s going to do something, it’s not going to disappear.” But sometimes they do. They just disappear because nobody takes it seriously.

‘When these fans made this coordinated effort, people somehow just noticed. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos happens to be a huge fan of The Expanse, so when he heard about it I guess he tried to make sure one of his favourite shows didn’t disappear.’

Amazon picked up the series 15 days after its cancellation, with the fourth season now set to be released in December this year and a fifth season on the far horizon.

Despite coming off the victory of fans’ campaign efforts, filming on the fourth season wasn’t the jubilant celebration initially you’d imagine, with many of the cast taking a while to adjust back into their rhythms.



‘It was such a surreal experience to go from letting something go you were in love with, accepting its passing, and it coming back to life and watching this person walk through the door you thought was gone,’ Cas said.

‘That was an adjustment period [for] the first few weeks of shooting. There was a lot of emotional tenderness with all of us until we got back into the swing of it. At the same time, it felt like we’d never left and it was as it should be.

‘This cancellation was a kind of blessing in disguise. It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to us because it brought the show to the knowledge of the entire world in a way it wasn’t before. And it brought us to a broadcaster that is perfect for the kind of show that we are.

‘A streaming service that gets into every single person’s home on the planet is a perfect place for The Expanse.’

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A first trailer for season four was unveiled during San Diego Comic-Con, showing Amazon has clearly invested a sizeable budget into boosting the show’s production value.

Any changes to the show aren’t entirely down to a new broadcaster though, with Cas explaining how the fourth book in the series marks a notable shift for The Expanse.

‘There’s going to be a transition for sure,’ Cas said. ‘How much of it is Amazon and how much of it is just the fact that book four is a very different book, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.


‘But the first three seasons, the first three books, are like the first movement of an opera. Book four represents the beginning of the second movement, and it’s almost poignant that we’ve transitioned from one network to another broadcaster with season four because it really is starting a new page of the journey for the Expanse family; narratively, dramatically, as well as just behind the scenes.

It’s still going to be the same show with the same creative team behind it, but I think people are going to find a very beautiful, new flavour.’

The Expanse season 4 releases on Amazon Prime Video on 13 December.

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