GLOW Canceled After Three Seasons at Netflix Due to COVID-19

[MA]

https://www.tvguide.com/news/glow-ca...NLS-04-10aaa2i

In crushing news, GLOW will not be returning for a fourth and final season after all. Netflix has reversed its earlier renewal and has decided to cancel the series due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch opened up about Netflix's decision not to move forward with finishing production on the show's final season. "COVID has killed actual humans. It's a national tragedy and should be our focus. COVID also apparently took down our show. Netflix has decided not to finish filming the final season of GLOW," they said in a statement shared with TV Guide. "We were handed the creative freedom to make a complicated comedy about women and tell their stories. And wrestle. And now that's gone. There's a lot of sh--ty things happening in the world that are much bigger than this right now. But it still sucks that we don't get to see these 15 women in a frame together again... We'll miss our cast of weirdo clowns and our heroic crew. It was the best job... Register to vote. And please vote."

Netflix also responded to news of the show's cancellation. "We've made the difficult decision not to do a fourth season of GLOW due to COVID, which makes shooting this physically intimate show with its large ensemble cast especially challenging," Netflix said in a statement. "We are so grateful to creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, Jenji Kohan and all the writers, cast and crew for sharing this story about the incredible women of GLOW with us and the world."

GLOW was among the more than 100 shows to halt production in mid-March as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. The series was only three weeks into filming — they had only completed one episode and started on the second episode — before the shutdown. Since the show filmed entirely in Los Angeles, which proved to be one of the more challenging places to restart production, Netflix had a hard time figuring out how to pick up filming on those final episodes.

Additional factors that hindered a production restart included the series' massive 20-member ensemble and the physical requirements of wrestling — which is essential to the series — which made it risky to produce the show safely during the pandemic. In particular, the heavy breathing and level of exertion required for wrestling was a huge risk for direct exposure and potential infection. Plus, with production delayed, the series would not have returned until at least 2022, two and a half years after Season 3 ended, and Netflix was not confident that the show would draw a big enough audience to justify an investment in that final season given the circumstances. The show's high production value and incredibly high COVID-related costs for a cast of that size, along with the show's extreme and unavoidable physicality, made GLOW too costly to produce.
Since the series resumed production and then was forced to shut down, however, all series regulars have been paid for Season 4 in full. GLOW's core cast includes Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin, Marc Maron, and AEW's Kia Stevens.
Deadline was the first to report this story.
Seasons 1-3 of GLOW are currently streaming on Netflix.

[Babalu]

Reading that article, you would think some great American tradition like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or annual tribute to war heroes had been taken away from us instead of a cheeky farce of a TV show based on a cheeky farce of a TV show that 95% of people never even knew existed.

[TMC]

GLOW's cancelation sucks, not just because the Netflix dramedy won't get to end as it planned

"It sucks because, in addition to focusing on women’s stories, GLOW also put women at the forefront behind the camera," says Jen Chaney. "Its showrunners were women. In each season, more than half of its directors were women, including the late, gifted Lynn Shelton, who died suddenly earlier this year of a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. The writing credits on the vast majority of episodes also belonged to women. The ensemble cast included women of different races, ethnicities, and, significantly, sizes, a testament to the fact that any woman can be powerful in spandex. Because of the ridiculous theater that typified the original 'Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling' during that era, some of the characters were often saddled with gross stereotypes. Season two’s 'Mother of All Matches' confronted that issue directly by placing Tammé (Kia Stevens) — wrestling name: Welfare Queen — in a pivotal match against Liberty Belle (Betty Gilpin), a.k.a. Debbie, that Tammé’s son comes to watch. The fact that Debbie mocks Welfare Queen, who is Black, for being poor and having too many kids hits Tammé as blatantly unfunny with her son, a Stanford student, watching. After the mostly white people in the audience start shouting at her to get a job, she suddenly starts crying and exits the ring. It’s a heartbreaking thing to witness. GLOW did this kind of thing regularly: placed us in the ’80s as some may remember it, with its high energy, gravity-defying hair, and shameless jokes, then revealed how insensitive, crass, and alienating it often was. The fact that the show was able to walk that line between silly camp and sincere social commentary was one of GLOW’s greatest feats. It took its characters and underlying themes seriously, but never took itself too seriously. At times it reveled in the fun of its era, filling its soundtrack with upbeat songs by everyone from Starship to Siouxsie and the Banshees to Scandal. It was really entertaining. But it also had depth, and it packed all of those elements into episodes that only lasted 30 minutes."

ALSO:

• Female-led shows always seem to get the short end of the stick at Netflix: "Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that GLOW has long been the kind of show that Netflix’s business model was supposed to support better than traditional networks—shows that, despite their sterling reputations, never quite manage to bring in the viewership linear networks count on to stay afloat," says Laura Bradley. "GLOW was never going to have broad, tentpole appeal. It’s a weird show about weird women wrestling, all managed by a puppyish producer and a jaded slasher director. The show’s perspective and especially its humor—with chestnuts like “There’s one ball you can’t castrate; that’s the mind”—have always been a beautiful blend of crassness and ultra-sequinned femininity. It was never a show for everyone, but for the someones it was for, GLOW hit a wonderful, rare sweet spot. And in lieu of a massive audience, GLOW was among the series that lended Netflix some prestige. Although the show never brought in the viral viewership of more popular programs like Stranger Things, it brought home nominations each year for cast and crew, and won in categories including stunt coordination and production design. Still, being adored by critics has never been enough to save shows from the increasingly cruel Netflix axe—especially if a show happens to be female-led; just ask One Day at a Time and Tuca & Bertie, both of which have found homes on other networks after Netflix cut them."
• GLOW's cancelation is a "tragedy": "Netflix claims GLOW was cancelled due to financial concerns, which is a real laugh in the year of big-budget dreck like Space Force, Altered Carbon, and Ratched," says Darren Franich. "(Friday brings The Haunting of Bly Manor, a horror anthology set in the cosplay '80s with one of the most boring season premieres I've ever seen.) Maybe GLOW just didn't fill any obvious niche for the streaming service anymore. (Betty) Gilpin earned Emmy nominations for her breakout performance, but the show was too weird to ever be an awards darling. It was very funny without ever being the sort of quippy banter-fest that gets all the attention lately. I called it 'feminist' back in paragraph one, yet there was a tricky not-quite-triumphalist approach to its characters' empowerment. They loved working together, and didn't know if their fans loved them for the right reasons. Ruth practically got sexually assaulted by the network president — and Debbie flat-out suggested she should have given in for the cause. These women were modest nobodies grasping for Z-level stardom, not quite the predominant world-conquering tone in a Mrs. America year. Was GLOW too silly for the serious audience and too serious for the silly audience? Executive producer Jenji Kohan actually lost two Netflix projects on Monday, since the service declined to renew her Teenage Bounty Hunters. (Tough market for anyone not producing a megabudget space opera, I guess.)"
• Alison Brie, Marc Maron, Shakira Barrera and more cast members say goodbye to GLOW

Marc Maron would like to see GLOW end with a Netflix movie following cancelation

“I think what they should do is just — okay so you don’t wanna do the show anymore, but let us make a movie, right? Let us wrap it up in a two-hour Netflix movie,” Maron said in an Instagram video. “They had the whole season laid out. We know where it’s gonna go.” Maron's idea was endorsed by his fellow GLOW co-stars. “F*** it let’s be actual GLOW girls and #SaveGLOW," tweeted Kate Nash. Meanwhile, Betty Gilpin mourned GLOW with a Vanity Fair essay. "I am sad," she wrote. "It was the best job I’ll ever have. Our business is a strange mix of attempting childhood dreams to a room full of asleep people and shirking dignity for awake tomato-throwers for rent. This was one of those extremely rare times where we got to do the dream for awake people. And it didn’t disappear in an audition room or unsent email. We did it on a show, recorded it all, I swear. Thirty episodes." ALSO: Alison Brie announces Saturday's prescheduled GLOW Q&A livestream will proceed despite cancelation.

Why canceling GLOW made sense for Netflix

When GLOW was renewed last year for a fourth and final season, the pickup was possibly "a bit of a stretch" and "the new COVID realities changed the equation just enough to make resuming production too much of a reach," says Vulture's Josef Adalian. "Whatever fondness Netflix execs have for the show probably just couldn’t overcome a simple cost-benefit analysis," he says. "The same likely goes for the other two series Netflix has recently unrenewed because of the pandemic (I Am Not Okay With This and The Society) as well as ABC’s decision to take back its second-season order of Stumptown and Showtime’s late Wednesday call to claw back its commitment to a second season of On Becoming a God In Central Florida." Adalian adds: "Network execs and producers I’ve spoken to in recent weeks have all told me that making sets safe(-er) from COVID is proving to be incredibly costly, so no doubt continuing on with plans to film season four would have meant spending lots more than originally planned. Given the nearly two-year delays between seasons of The Crown and Stranger Things — or the five-year gap between seasons four and five of Arrested Development — citing timing as a rationale as well strikes me as … odd. Fans of GLOW aren’t going to suddenly grow disinterested in something because its return is delayed six or nine months. On the other hand, Netflix’s scheduling needs and budget realities are probably different now than they were in August 2019, when GLOW was initially renewed. Netflix loves it some data, and the numbers which supported one verdict a year ago may be saying something different today. After all, dozens of other shows and movies have debuted on the service over the past 14 months, some of them likely of great appeal to the same taste clusters who love GLOW. If Netflix has something else that can service those viewers, it may have decided it was safe to move on. It’s also possible that the core of viewers who loved GLOW simply was never that big in the first place, something series star Betty Gilpin suggested in a Vanity Fair article post-cancellation." “Apparently numbers-wise GLOW really only appealed to men in kimonos and women in cat hair, who as far as I’m concerned are the beating heart of the arts and the reason to keep waking up,” Gilpin wrote.

[James28]

Wow, Netflix just had to come-up with a perfect excuse to cop-out and leave a show's story unfinished for the sake of business. No-one is going to want to watch a show that ended on a cliff-hanger these days, especially if it's simply due to the COVID-19 nightmare virus! GLOW was one of my top choices for something I'd watch if I ever got a subscription to Netflix, but now, thanks to this reverse-renewal decision, I'll have to avoid it at all costs. Netflix brass didn't have enough confidence that there would be a big enough audience tuning-in for the final season of GLOW if it ever resumed production to cover its huge costs, hence, this very saddening decision to leave its story unfinished forever.

I'd have to think Grace and Frankie is next to get a reversal on its latest renewal, because that one also has a final season coming up, and its stars are in the worst age group to be contracting COVID-19.

[Babalu]

Originally Posted by TMC

"It sucks because, in addition to focusing on women’s stories, GLOW also put women at the forefront behind the camera," says Jen Chaney. "Its showrunners were women. In each season, more than half of its directors were women, including the late, gifted Lynn Shelton, who died suddenly earlier this year of a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. The writing credits on the vast majority of episodes also belonged to women. The ensemble cast included women of different races, ethnicities, and, significantly, sizes, a testament to the fact that any woman can be powerful in spandex.

This is all these shitheads think about.

All they are interested in is making every show less white and less male.

Whether it's good or entertaining never enters their heads.

It's automatically great because it's done by women.

Glad you got canceled.

[TMC]

GLOW cast members have an emotional virtual reunion following Netflix's abrupt cancelation

The live Q&A Saturday featuring Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin, Marc Maron and other cast members had been planned before Netflix opted to reverse its Season 4 renewal due to the coronavirus.

[TMC]

Alison Brie Calls 'GLOW' Cancellation the 'Great Heartbreak of My Career'

[TMC]

6 Years Later, Netflix Cancelling This 3-Part Comedy Series Has Aged Terribly

Netflix regularly cancels promising TV shows, but GLOW was one of the most heartbreaking. Years later, there has not been a show that fills that gap.