Plenty of Netflix shows have ended before the creators had a chance to wrap up their stories, but The Society was a unique case. Following the successful debut in May 2019, the teen sci-fi drama was promptly renewed for a second season in July of the same year. Production was set to begin on the new season in March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic made that impossible. A few months later, Netflix decided to pull the plug and cancel the series.
That makes this video all the more devastating for fans of the series:
Years later, there’s still a vocal movement that wants Netflix to revive the show or for the story to continue in some way. It turns out that The Society creator Christopher Keyser seems to be part of that movement, as he told Variety in a recent interview.
“This wasn’t a normal cancellation,” Keyser told Variety this May. “This wasn’t about not having the audience or we didn’t believe in it anymore. There was a global crisis that changed all of our lives in the one year we were able to make it.”
He added: “It really feels like this thing that we loved and were ready for was taken away more than anything I’ve ever done. That’s true for the writers and Marc Webb, with whom I made the show. There’s a sense that it stopped in mid-animation, but we knew a lot of what was going to happen on the other side. There’s also the emotional thing going on with the audience reaching out to us and consistently saying, ‘Tell me what happened. When is it coming back?’”
Keyser revealed that he and the team came close to releasing a graphic novel that would have picked up after the finale, but the publisher went out of business. At every turn, the world finds a way to stop this story from moving forward.
Keyser says he and his collaborators still frequently discuss bringing The Society back. He isn’t confident it will ever happen, but he knows that the fans are “still moved by it and want answers to the questions,” and says it has “gotten under my skin as well.”
