America’s Most Wanted canceled by Lifetime

Looks like America’s Most Wanted is no longer wanted by Lifetime.

After a 44-episode run on the woman-centric network, which acquired AMW from it’s original network home Fox in 2011, the show’s executive producer/host John Walsh and its distributor Twentieth Television opted to make the show’s recent absence from the Lifetime schedule a permanent one.

In its 25-season run, Americas Most Wanted contributed to the capture of more than 1,200 fugitives around the globe, including 36 during its brief Lifetime run. Fox canceled the series briefly in 1996 but revived it soon after when politicians and law enforcement officials from 37 states championed its survival, lending irrefutable cred to the show’s effectiveness as a criminal-capturing tool.

While the door remains open for the series to make a move to a third network home, TV Guide — who broke the cancellation news on Thursday — also reports that Walsh is working with Lifetime on a new series called John Walsh Investigates.

Neither Walsh nor Lifetime has made an official statement about AMW‘s cancellation or the timeline for Walsh’s newest crime-fighting venture.

Lifetime photo by Denis Vlasov