School is out at HBO Max: The streamer has scuttled its deliberate revival of Degrassi.
Like plenty of different initiatives, the Degrassi revival is a casualty of post-merger cutbacks at Warner Bros. Discovery. The present scored a sequence order in January 2022, just a few months earlier than the merger between Discovery and WarnerMedia grew to become remaining.
WildBrain, which owns the Degrassi franchise, was set to supply the brand new sequence, which like its predecessors would have adopted college students and lecturers on the titular college who’re “living in the shadow of events that both bind them together and tear them apart,” per the present’s logline. Lara Azzopardi (The Bold Type) and Julia Cohen (Riverdale, A Million Little Things) have been tapped as showrunners. (Cohen can be the showrunner of ABC’s midseason drama The Company You Keep.)
As a part of the deal, HBO Max additionally acquired the 14 seasons of Degrassi: The Next Generation, which ran from 2001-15. Those episodes stay on the streamer.
Warner Bros. Discovery has made plenty of cuts to programming focused at youngsters and households in current months, together with the cancellation of Gordita Chronicles and animated sequence Little Ellen at HBO Max and dropping a number of library sequence and tons of of older episodes of Sesame Street from the streamer. When it canceled Gordita Chronicles in late July, HBO Max mentioned in an announcement that “live-action kids and family programming will not be part of our programming focus in the immediate future.”
WBD additionally infamously scrapped a completed Batgirl movie that was to have debuted on HBO Max, J.J. Abrams’ expensive HBO sequence Demimonde and has laid off dozens of staff because it seeks billions of {dollars} in in value financial savings following the merger. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Degrassi cancellation, additionally famous that the corporate shelved an animated Charlotte’s Web miniseries co-produced by Sesame Workshop.
WBD CEO David Zaslav defended the cuts on the corporate’s quarterly earnings name Thursday: “We didn’t take one show off a platform that would help us in any way,” he mentioned. Going ahead, Zaslav vowed to “replace those shows with content that has a chance to be more successful, and have a larger audience.”
