If you’re a struggling cable channel in the era of Peak TV, and your selling points are reality shows, maybe canceling your top reality show to cater to angry millennial Black Lives Matter supporters, who don’t have cable and binge Netflix, wasn’t a good plan.

Maybe.

Ratings for A&E Network have plummeted since it canceled the hit police reality show “Live PD” on June 10, a sign of how much the network relies on law-enforcement programming.

In the time period immediately following the cancellation, June 11th to July 19th, A&E viewership was 498,000 people. That’s down 49% from last year.

At the time of its cancellation, Live PD was one of the highest-rated shows on basic cable. A week after the show was pulled in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the shows’ hiatus was made permanent.

Hoarders just can’t fill that gap. And you can only imagine how the Paramount Network, that thing you never heard of, is doing after canceling Cops.

The Left claimed that it wanted to kill Live PD and Cops because they glamorized law enforcement. Pro-crime outlets like the Marshall Project also tried to gin up scandals involving the show. But the real reason the Left wanted to kill Live PD is it shows what cops are like and have to deal with in the real world. It’s harder to demonize people when you actually see what they’re like.