When Does Lethal Weapon Season 4 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Lethal Weapon about?

Adapting the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover film franchise for weekly television was always going to be a gamble, and for about a season and a half, it paid off reasonably well. The FOX series leans hard into the buddy-cop formula, pairing Damon Wayans as the cautious, family-anchored Roger Murtaugh with a loose-cannon partner who keeps landing them both in explosions, car chases, and morally complicated situations. It is comfort television with a higher body count than usual, and people who grew up watching the movies will find the rhythms familiar enough to settle into quickly.

Wayans is genuinely the best thing here. He plays Murtaugh's constant exasperation with real warmth, and his comic timing makes scenes work that the scripts probably did not fully earn. The first two seasons featured Clayne Crawford as the unstable Martin Riggs, and the show had a particular chemistry in those early episodes, mixing genuine darkness about trauma and grief with the expected action silliness. That combination felt fresher than it had any right to. Then Crawford was fired after the second season amid reported on-set tensions, and Seann William Scott came in as an entirely new character, Wesley Cole. Scott is likeable and capable, but the recalibration cost the show whatever edge it had accumulated.

Critics treated it as a pleasant but disposable network adaptation. Audiences were broadly fine with it, giving it solid enough ratings to run three seasons, and the IMDb score of 7.8 reflects the kind of approval that comes with lowered expectations being comfortably met. Nobody was calling it essential television.

What is worth noting is how much the Murtaugh family scenes elevate the show above its genre baseline. Keesha Sharp as Trish Murtaugh gives the domestic scenes actual weight, and the show is noticeably better whenever it remembers to let Wayans play a husband and father rather than just a straight man for chaos. That domestic grounding is precisely what the original films also understood, and it is the one thing the series consistently got right.

Created by Matthew Miller

Is Lethal Weapon renewed or cancelled?

Why was Lethal Weapon cancelled?

Lethal Weapon's cancellation came down to one thing more than anything else: Clayne Crawford. The actor playing Martin Riggs was reportedly difficult on set throughout the show's run, and after complaints from cast and crew, FOX removed him ahead of season three. That kind of mid-run lead replacement is almost always a death sentence, and replacing Crawford with Seann William Scott, however game the effort, couldn't hold the audience together.

The ratings reflected that damage clearly. The first two seasons performed reasonably well for FOX, but season three saw a significant drop in viewership. Audiences who had invested in the Crawford-Damon Wayans dynamic simply weren't coming back for a reconfigured version of the show. The chemistry that made the original film franchise work depended on a specific kind of odd-couple tension, and rebuilding that from scratch in a third season, with a lighter comedic tone to match Scott's persona, felt like a different show wearing the same name.

FOX ultimately had a struggling drama on its hands with diminished ratings, an audience that had already moved on, and no obvious path back to what had made the first two seasons work. Cancelling after season three was the network cutting its losses rather than investing further in a show that had lost its footing.

Lethal Weapon Season 4 Release Date

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Lethal Weapon latest news

• Why Fox Canceled Lethal Weapon After Three Seasons

  NewsAPI:/FILM · 2025-06-24cancellation