‘The Ultimate Surfer’ Gets Canned After One Season 

The Ultimate Surfer season 2 has been canceled. 

TUS which premiered in August 2021 and ran for eight eps has failed to win over the coal hearts of American Broadcasting Corporation execs after collecting the lowest viewership numbers on the ABC’s Summer 2021 schedule.

Despite drawing high praise from Stab scribe, The Ultimate Surf Fan, the show which featured a mix bag of male and female talent competing in surf and surf-adjacent challenges for the chance of winning three wildcards on the CT and and $100K, averaged a 0.29 rating from its 18-49 target demographic. For context, ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and NBC’s This Is Us all all had ratings of 1.7, meaning 1.7% of the total amount of households tuned into watch.

With a formidable production lineup including WSL CEO Erik Logan and UFC President Dana White, and casting the much beloved talking head and former-NFL star Jesse Palmer as host, the show aimed to suck a mainstream audience into the niche fold of surf culture with a reality-TV twist on a classic gameshow elimination-style format. 

In Stab’s podcast with Dana White, he made his feelings clear about the core-surf audience’s sheepishness to engage with the proposed program. “I could not express to you enough how much I don’t give a shit. I want the mainstream audience, I don’t care about the hardcore fans.” True to his word, shits were not given to the core, but they weren’t given to the mainstream either apparently, with people mostly being confused about why aspiring CT surfers were playing spin the bottle. 

We are deeply saddened by the news of TUS’s passing, but like the inevitable clot coming to a person who eats fingerbuns to the exclusion of all else, we are hardly surprised. 

RIP TUS.