While ratings began agreeably, by the end of the first season they were down significantly. During the second season, the ratings slowly rose toward the end; however, the show became increasingly expensive to produce at the same time. Many fans suspected that, due to HBO's tradition of carrying shows through to an end, and Daniel Knauf's six-year-plan, the show would be renewed, but in May 2005, it was leaked that the series would not be returning for another season. HBO confirmed that the show had been canceled on 11 May 2005. The show's ending after its second season and leaving so many plot lines unfinished has outraged many viewers.Some of them organized petitions and mailing drives to HBO to get the shows renewed.According to HBO's president this generated 50,000 emails in one weekend to the network. Michael J. Anderson was a guest star on "Humbug," a 1995 episode of "The X-Files" in which he played a hotel owner who was offended when Mulder mistook him for a carnival worker (the
episode was about a town inhabited by a large number of retired or wintering carnies). In "Carnivàle" (2003), Anderson plays the head of a traveling carnival.
SPOILER: The character and story arc of Brother Justin contain references to several real-life radio preachers of the period. Justin's radio success, his building of a massive "temple" for Christian worship in Southern California, and especially his mysterious, never-fully explained disappearance (and its ensuing media frenzy) are all references to the life of Aimee Semple McPherson. McPherson started her career as a traveling evangelist, but by the early 1920s, she was one of the first preachers to take full advantage of radio technology, and was such a successful radio personality that the ensuing donations to her ministry from across the country enabled her to build one of the first "megachurches," the 5300-person-capacity Angelus Temple in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. In 1926, McPherson disappeared without any warning,
and then returned about a month later, claiming that she has been kidnapped, abused, drugged, and held for ransom money in a deserted Mexican shack. However, reporters later found no evidence of this, and much greater evidence of the possibility that McPherson had really spent that time at a seaside resort in California with her radio engineer, who was married to another woman. The other period radio personality from whom much of Brother Justin's story was drawn is Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic Priest who at the height of his popularity in the 1930s commanded a radio audience of over forty million listeners per week. Justin's use of isolationist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant scare tactics to terrify and enthrall his audiences comes straight from Father Coughlin.
