Lovecraft Country won’t be returning to HBO for a second season.
The network confirmed the news in a Friday announcement. Lovecraft Country was adapted from Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, which used
“We will not be moving forward with a second season of Lovecraft Country. We are grateful for the dedication and artistry of the gifted cast and crew, and to Misha Green, who crafted this groundbreaking series. And to the fans, thank you for joining us on this journey,”
Green, who served as Lovecraft‘s showrunner, didn’t comment on the cancellation directly, though she did share a tiny peek at t he “Season 2 Bible” on Friday after the news emerged. The theoretical second season would have carried the subtitle “Supremacy,” and it was to have introduced viewers to a reorganized “Sovereign States of America.”
Markings on the restructured U.S. map in Green’s tweet suggest the Season 2 journey would have spanned the length of the map’s “Whitelands,” between southern Pennsylvania and northern Texas. Though that’s just a red dot and a red X; who’s to say what the route from one to the other would’ve looked like?
Green then shared a tiny morsel of additional detail on Saturday that offers a better sense of what might have been.
It’s a tantalizing tease, but perhaps the bigger standout feature of Green’s tweet is her choice of hashtag. The
It was pitched as an alt-history sci-fi drama set in a world where the U.S. southern states successfully seceded as a result of the Civil War. The show would have picked up generations later, introducing a reimagined North America where the nation founded by the former U.S. states evolved slavery into a modern institution.
Notably, Confederate was to be spearheaded by Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — both of whom are white. So the #noconfederate pressure campaign was conceived to protest HBO’s support for the idea. It seemed to work. The network went relatively silent after the show’s announcement in 2017, and
Which brings us back to Green’s tweet. The #noconfederate hashtag existed for a very specific purpose: To protest the existence of an ill-advised TV project that many felt had no business being in the hands of two white creators (particularly in light of
Confederate never ended up happening, but not necessarily because HBO was cowed by the criticism. The network only ever went as far as acknowledging that the initial announcement was handled poorly. And when news emerged in 2020 that it was, in fact, no longer happening, it only came after
In other words: HBO never really closed the book on Confederate in a way that suggested it had actually listened to critics. So Green’s use of the hashtag now is a little reminder of the network’s fraught recent history with another alt-history project that it seemed only too willing to press forward with until other business considerations — as opposed to social considerations — surfaced.
Green will be fine, though. She co-created
UPDATE: July 3, 2021, 9:27 p.m. EDT Added Green’s follow-up tweet.