When Does Terra Nova Season 2 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Terra Nova about?

Terra Nova sends an ordinary family through a time portal to prehistoric Earth, where they're supposed to help establish a settlement that will secure humanity's future. The premise works as wish fulfillment: escape the dying present, start over in a world of open skies and untamed wilderness, build something new. If you're drawn to survival stories or the idea of a found community creating its own rules, there's enough here to sustain interest for a season.

The show tries to balance family drama with dinosaur encounters and political intrigue among the colonists, which creates tonal whiplash. Scenes of parental concern about teenage rebellion sit uncomfortably next to action sequences and conspiracies that suggest a darker, more cynical show trying to emerge. Steven Lang brings real authority as the settlement's commander, and there's competent work across the board, but the writing can't quite decide whether to commit to intimate character work or epic adventure. The result feels scattered, like a show that hasn't found its voice.

Audiences didn't stick around long enough to let it. The eleven-episode first season aired in fall 2011 and was cancelled almost immediately, making it a footnote in the graveyard of Fox's abandoned science fiction projects. Viewers and critics alike found it too expensive-looking yet too conventional, too earnest but not quite earnest enough. There was nothing wrong with it exactly, which was part of the problem.

Terra Nova arrived too early for the kind of serialized, mythology-heavy science fiction that networks were still figuring out how to execute. It wants to be important and permanent, but it never gives you a reason to come back beyond basic curiosity about what happens next. The dinosaurs look fine. The family feels real enough. But none of it adds up to something you need to see.

Created by Kelly Marcel, Craig Silverstein

Is Terra Nova renewed or cancelled?

Why was Terra Nova cancelled?

Terra Nova arrived on Fox in the fall of 2011 as an expensive bet on spectacle. The show had all the ingredients a network might think audiences wanted: time travel, dinosaurs, a family at the center of a mysterious colony, and enough visual effects to justify a hefty per-episode budget. It premiered to reasonable numbers, but that initial audience eroded quickly over the show's eleven-episode run. By December, when the season wrapped after just three months on air, viewership had dropped enough that Fox saw no reason to continue.

The cancellation reflects a hard reality of broadcast television economics. Terra Nova cost significantly more to produce than most network dramas because of its reliance on effects work and location shooting. When ratings declined as sharply as they did, the math no longer worked. The show had built its premise on the promise of exploration and mystery, but viewers apparently found the execution less compelling than the concept. A show needs either sustained ratings or critical acclaim to justify those kinds of expenses on a broadcast network, and Terra Nova had neither by the time its abbreviated first season ended.

What made this particularly brutal was the speed of it all. Eleven episodes and done, no real chance to find an audience or develop the mythology the pilot had sketched out. It's one of the sharper examples of how quickly a network can abandon a high-concept show if the numbers don't cooperate from the start.

Terra Nova Season 2 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

Terra Nova seasons

Where to watch Terra Nova

Amazon VideobuyApple TV StorebuyFandango At Homebuy

Terra Nova latest news