ITV has confirmed that the reality show The Neighbourhood will not be returning for a second season.
When it was first announced last year, the ambitious Graham Norton-fronted series had plenty of hype behind it, pitting different households in a purpose-build cul-de-sac against one another in a variety of different challenges to try and win their share of a hefty cash prize.
The head of entertainment and reality commissioning at ITV, Katie Rawcliffe, has now told Broadcast: “Everything we do at ITV is a risk. Nothing flies under the radar. [The Neighbourhood] was a really exciting, paper format and we obviously were really enthused by it… ultimately it didn’t land in a big enough way.”
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Upon its release, The Guardian and The Telegraph each gave The Neighbourhood two stars, with the former claiming that Graham was the “tired” show’s only “saving grace”.
Meanwhile, The Times called The Neighbourhood “mediocre”, “derivative”, “bland” and “boring”, maintaining that it “doesn’t come within a country mile of” The Traitors, despite its best efforts.
Despite comparisons with The Traitors, Graham previously insisted that The Neighbourhood stood on its own two feet.
“It properly is a new format,” he told ITV. “It’s not ‘something meets something else’, it’s not, ‘it’s like this, but that’. I really thought, ‘I hadn’t seen this show before’.”
He continued: “It leans into our curiosity about what’s behind closed doors and there’s something really compelling and addictive about seeing the way the existing households interact with each other. I thought, ‘I’d watch that’ – and I’d never want to work on something I wouldn’t watch. I thought, ‘this show would hook me!’.”
