Survivor’s Remorse joined the eternally-expanding list of cancelled tv show‘s last week, but creator Mike O’Malley admits he wasn’t ready to end the series.
Speaking to THR, O’Malley reveals he had a six-season plan for the axed basketball comedy:
I had a longer-term plan for the next two seasons. I thought it was gonna go about six seasons. I’ll admit that when the show started, when we sold the show and we were originally developing the idea, the idea in half-hours was always “Don’t answer too many questions because if you answer a question you’re gonna back yourself into a corner and you wanna just have it be episodic where you can drop in on a show at any juncture.” If you go back and look at the first season of the show, we were just going at topics and issues. Those were standalone things. … That was also the way that the production schedule and the writing schedule was set up. Then it became obvious around 2014 just how people were viewing television and consuming television was different.
Having left the fourth season (now series) finale open-ended, O’Malley admits he fully expected Remorse to return for Season 5:
The journey for me is that I wrote it open-ended thinking that the show was coming back for a fifth season. The actors were under contract for a fifth season. We weren’t going to have a renegotiation issue with the actors. They were ready to go. We just had to let them know. It’s interesting. We had an interesting and fun show and the majority of people, I think, who engaged with the show enjoyed it and came back for more and stayed with us. When we were on after Power, that was a great boost to us.
On the unlikely prospect of a streaming company such as Netflix or Amazon saving Remorse, O’Malley concedes:
I love it. Listen, I’d love to keep writing the show. The thing about this show is that it’s owned by Starz. Starz’s goal is that you have the Starz ap and you become connected to Starz programming and you want to have their network so that whatever it is that Starz delivers to an audience, you have. They don’t want to become a production company for another network or another streaming service, just to put it bluntly.
Will you miss Survivor’s Remorse? Planning to boycott Starz? Was the series cancelled at the right time? Holding out for a far-fetched revival elsewhere?
We’ll monitor the cancellation escape hatch just in case…
kathi says
glad it’s over the acting by the basketball guy was awful and the mother was way over the top
Charlene Brooks says
It’s okay , I love this show this is the ONLY reason why I have Starz is because of Survivor’s Remorse..So once it’s cancel I will cancel my Starz and I know a lot of people will follow The only other things you have going on is POWER,,and everybody don’t look at Power.
Bye Felicia