Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly’s Texas romance ends with the pair together, but no Season 3 on the way
Netflix has decided not to move forward with a third season of Ransom Canyon, the Texas-set romantic drama led by Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly, bringing the show to a close just a month and a half after its second season debuted on July 23.
The cancellation caps a shaky run for the series, an adaptation of Jodi Thomas’ novels. Season 1 drew respectable but unspectacular viewership, leaving the show on the bubble for months before Netflix eventually renewed it — more than two months after its premiere — with a trimmed episode order (eight, down from ten) and a reshuffled supporting cast.
Season 2 reportedly played better creatively with people inside the company despite the changes, but its audience numbers moved in the wrong direction. The new season opened with 4.1 million views in its first week, a 43% drop from Season 1’s 7.2 million opening-week viewership. It did briefly push Season 1 back into Netflix’s global Top 10, which the streamer values, but Season 2 itself fell out of the Top 10 after just three weeks, compared to four for the first season. Given the show’s substantial budget and marquee-name leads, that decline made a third-season renewal a hard sell for Netflix as it weighs cost against performance across its slate.
Ransom Canyon isn’t alone in seeing a steep year-over-year audience drop for a sophomore season — several other Netflix shows posted similar or bigger declines and still got renewed, including Running Point, The Four Seasons, The Gentlemen, Avatar: The Last Airbender and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, most of which had secured their next seasons before their second outings even premiered.
A notable pay-parity moment
Beyond the show itself, Ransom Canyon will be remembered in the industry for Kelly’s decision, when offered the co-lead role opposite Duhamel back in 2022, to push for pay parity with her co-star — a bold ask at a time of industry-wide belt-tightening in the post-pandemic, post-peak-TV era. She didn’t land full parity but came close, and has previously credited Netflix for how it responded to her request.
How the story wrapped
The series followed childhood friends turned star-crossed lovers Staten Kirkland (Duhamel) and Quinn O’Grady (Kelly), whose timing never quite lined up across two seasons of ranching-family drama, shifting loyalties and small-town upheaval in the fictional Texas town of Ransom Canyon.
Season 2 tested the pair again — Quinn was briefly engaged to someone else — but unlike the Season 1 finale, which ended with Staten and Quinn split up, the Season 2 closer left them together and in a good place, without the kind of jaw-dropping cliffhanger that defined the first finale. That should offer some comfort to fans, even without a third season to resolve loose threads like a possible love triangle involving Ellie (Marianly Tejada) or a bigger role for Staten’s half-brother Levi (Steve Howey), who got little screen time in the finale.
April Blair created the series and served as showrunner and executive producer, alongside stars Duhamel and Kelly and fellow executive producers Dan Angel, Bradley Gardner and Joe Fazzio.
Based on reporting by Nellie Andreeva for Deadline Hollywood, published September 10, 2026.
