The Warner Bros. Discovery merger has claimed many victims with various movies and shows getting axed, all in the interest of cutting costs and embracing a new creative strategy. One new direction that will be taken with HBO Max is cutting back on programming aimed at families and children. After Gordita Chronicles was axed after one season as a result of this change, it was soon after reported that Little Ellen had been canceled as well after two seasons on the streaming platform.
Getting canceled is never a good thing, but it's even worse when there are completed episodes that will now never see the light of day. 20 episodes had been produced for planned third and fourth seasons of Little Ellen, but with the show's cancelation, all of those episodes have been shelved. Worse yet, the first two seasons that previously streamed on HBO Max have been removed, almost as if the show never existed.
In a new interview with Variety, series co-creator Jennifer Skelly opened up about Little Ellen getting axed. According to Skelly, the show's team was told in June that the third season had simply been pushed back to 2023. It wasn't long after when they learned that the show had been outright canceled and yanked from HBO Max completely. That was "devastating," as Skelly explains, describing how the show fell victim to the streaming wars.
“It’s really devastating. I’ve worked on a million things that have never seen the light of day, but it’s pretty rare that you get this far down the pipe — it’s literally done — and it’s still not going to see the light of day. In the streaming culture, I don’t know everything about how that process is done. But to me, it seems like, ‘Well you’ve got them. Just flip a switch. They’re done and they’re delivered.’ But obviously there’s so much corporate stuff going on in terms of what that means for them financially.”
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Skelly goes on to explain how a lot of people have been negatively affected by the cancelation. She feels for them, but she also doesn't see this causing other creatives to be leery of working with Warner Bros. Discovery in the future, as this kind of thing will certainly be considered in contract negotiations going forward.
“There were writers who had their first episodes in that back 20, and there were directors who got their first shot at directing. We had a lot of firsts on our crew, and they won’t get to see those episodes on TV and see their credit. It’s really tough. I don’t think people are going to avoid working with that studio or even necessarily be able to know what to ask for in the contract to protect themselves, because the parameters in a year-and-a-half are going to be different again.”
Of course, it probably hasn't helped that Ellen DeGeneres has suffered through her own unrelated controversies in recent years, especially regarding allegations of a "toxic workplace" behind the scenes of her talk show. That may have made the new brass at Warner Bros. Discovery more apprehensive about moving forward with a cartoon show based on the celebrity. With her talk show also ending this year, it's possible the Ellen brand may have been seen as less valuable than it had been when the show was first ordered to series at HBO Max.
"We were a perfect storm of many things, because the Ellen brand has also suffered in the last few years. Our show wasn’t going to be getting a ton of love anyway for that reason. We started out at the high point of her career, but by the time it was animated — because it takes forever to get something done in animation — her brand was in a really different place, and her show was ending.”
Time will tell if Little Ellen ever shows back up at a new home, but as of now, it's not streaming anywhere.