Mob Wives Chicago sleeps with the fishes. A VH1 spokesperson has confirmed that the Windy City follow up to their popular New York City based Mob Wives series will not be coming back for a second season. The Chicago Sun-Times spoke with a few of the cast members and got their disappointed reactions as well as a litany of reasons for the cancelation that included the Olympics, lack of advertising, and something called an “accent barrier.”
“It’s just sad; it had so much potential,” said Pia Rizza. “It was a terrible time to be aired at Sunday nights in the summer,” she added, saying also that the Olympics hurt the show’s ratings as well.
Whatever the reason, the ratings just never picked up for the show, averaging about 500,000 an episode. By contrast, the original Mob Wives series was pulling in right around two million viewers an episode.
Rizza’s cast mate Leah DeSimone thinks VH1 didn’t do as much marketing as they should have. “I don’t feel we were advertised enough,” she says.
DeSimone and Rizza said they knew the prospects for a sophomore season were shaky when producers didn’t pursue a reunion show to cap off the first season. Rizza and DeSimone tell the Sun-Times they knew the writing was on the wall when the network didn’t bother doing a Mob Wives Season 1 reunion show. “We didn’t film a reunion,” Rizza says, “but I can assure you it would have been very juicy.”
Meanwhile, DeSimone said she was led to believe there would be a reunion show and even cleared out her schedule per the network’s request. “They even said don’t go anywhere the first two weeks of August,” DeSimone said. “I missed a wedding out of town because I thought there was going to be a reunion. How fair was that to my family? Week one passed. Week two. No one returned my calls.”
It wasn’t until October that DeSimone received a call from producers telling her there would be no reunion and that the show would not be returning for a second season. When DeSimone inquired about the reason for the cancelation, she was told it had something to do with an “accent barrier.”
“I don’t know if they meant it was hard to understand us?” DeSimone said. At the time she received the call, DeSimone was at the hospital with her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer, so she didn’t press the issue.
No word if this announcement will impact VH1’s plans to expand the Mob Wives franchise into Philadelphia.
