Ovation's Canadian spy thriller, X Company, will air its series finale on Monday night. And while fans might be sad the show has reached its final chapter, X Company Season 4 was never really in the cards. According to TVSeriesFinale.com, the series originally ran for three seasons on the Canadian Broadcasting Channel before getting picked up by Ovation in 2017. IMDb notes that its original run was from 2015 to 2017, and no other seasons since then have been put into production. So, it's not that Ovation is actively not renewing X Company — they've simply run out of episodes to broadcast.
That being said, three seasons feels right; considering the show is based on a true story, adding more episodes just for the sake of it could have diluted an important piece of history. According to the CBC, the drama is based on real-life events of World War II and is focused on “a little known place that played a vital role in the Allied war victory" — aka Camp X, where X Company is set. Per the CBC, it’s a spot on the shores of Lake Ontario where hundreds of spies were trained, and the first camp of its kind to exist in North America.
Apparently, the show did its source material justice — reviews have been glowing. Amy Glynn wrote in her review for Paste magazine that she enjoyed X Company so much that she was disappointed to learn the show didn’t extend past a third season. “These are really solid performers in a tense, fraught, one-wrong-move-and-you’re-toast situation,” she wrote. “It’s pretty great.”
And back in 2015 when the episodes initially aired in Canada, Denette Wilford of the Huffington Post called the story of Camp X “long overdue," and praised the show’s delivery. “From the disturbing opening scene, which definitely sets the tone for the series, to the end of the first episode — jubilant yet somehow still ominous — X Company is another history lesson CBC is offering audiences, and it nails it once again.”
The existence of Camp X was pretty much unknown until recent years, making X Company an illuminating show for those who were unaware of its history. “Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King didn’t even know it existed and it was right in his own backyard,” co-creator Mark Ellis said, per the aforementioned Huffington Post report. “People who worked there were sworn to secrecy and [information about its existence] wasn’t even declassified until the 1980s.”
Ellis also said that the main characters of the show helped to keep the experience authentic and personal, even though it takes place during a huge and deadly war. "I think it's important to tell these stories now because they're stories that we're losing," he continued. "We're not writing episodes that are about epic battles or air raids or extractions. It's about one-on-one encounters with people.”
Even though X Company won’t go on, it seems it’s served its purpose. Camp X’s history is known to viewers in Canada and now the United States, and a tidy three seasons of TV was all it took.
