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The female researchers who sued Newsweek for sex discrimination in the early 1970s eventually won, but it’s not entirely clear yet whether the fictionalized version of the story on Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt will play out the same way.
Amazon greenlit the stylish, Mad Men-esque series a year ago based on the subscriber response to the pilot episode and released all 10 episodes in late October. Last week — and barely a month after releasing it — Amazon abruptly announced that it did not plan to make a second season. The announcement came as a surprise to production studio Sony Pictures Television and many other Hollywood observers given the show’s generally positive reviews, anecdotal evidence of strong viewership, and Amazon’s general tendency to make multiple seasons of its original series.
“We had twice Transparent’s audience,” Good Girls Revolt creator Dana Calvo told Buzzfeed, citing data from the Symphony Advanced Media service that estimates ratings for shows on streaming services. “We were stunned by Amazon’s decision, but heartened and encouraged by Sony’s devotion to the project.” Amazon does not provide viewership data to the production companies that make its original shows, and producers often use Symphony in renewal negotiations to bolster claims of a show’s popularity.
“We had high hopes for Good Girls Revolt,” Amazon Studios development chief Joe Lewis told The Hollywood Reporter, “and have tremendous respect for the creators, cast and Sony, but I can tell you that the Symphony numbers being reported are wrong and that the show wasn’t performing at the levels we had hoped for — either in total viewership or completion rates.”
The cancellation has generated a vocal pushback from the series creator, a number of its stars, and female writers in Hollywood, tech, feminism and political circles. “The decision — particularly given that Good Girls Revolt is about women fighting for equal opportunity in the workplace — seems rather tone-deaf,” the Los Angeles Times’s Meredith Blake wrote, citing Amazon’s recent substantial investment in expensive shows from A-list men like Robert De Niro and Billy Bob Thornton. An online petition met its goal of 10,000 signatures Thursday only a day after a fan put it online, and there are already 4,000 more.
ABC, Freeform, USA Network, Bravo and Hulu are reportedly in discussions with Sony Pictures Television to distribute a second season of the show. A Sony spokesperson told Decider on Thursday that there were “at least two other” networks with serious interest in making a second season. Sony, which produces NBC’s Timeless and AMC’s Better Call Saul, has had success placing cancelled shows at new networks, including Community (from NBC to Yahoo Screen) and Damages (from FX to DirecTV’s Audience Network).
A new season of Good Girls Revolt on a new network would be further evidence of just how much the relative bargaining power between content and distribution has shifted toward content. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, a cancellation was usually the end of the road for a TV series. Over the last decade, new cable, premium and streaming networks have given producers more outlets to sell their shows to, and the studios can also now move those shows through a profitable life cycle — from broadcast to VOD to home video to streaming services — with no allegiance to any one distributor.
More recently, shows have become available across numerous devices, universal search has made shows easier to find, and the user interfaces — including, ironically, on Amazon’s Fire tablets and Fire TV streaming devices — emphasize shows to a much greater extent than networks that air them. A network that picks up a new season of Good Girls Revolt would also presumably secure the rights to Season 1 as Hulu (The Mindy Project), Netflix (Gilmore Girls) and Showtime (Twin Peaks) have done for continuations of shows that originally aired on other networks.
If Bravo or Hulu is premiering Season 2 of Good Girls Revolt a year from now, no one will care — and few will remember — that it started out on Amazon.
[Watch Good Girls Revolt on Amazon Prime Video]
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
