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Paper Girls won’t be returning for another season on Amazon Prime. The time-traveling sci-fi series is based on the graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang. Paper Girls follows a group of young girls thrown forward in time on their morning paper route. As they struggle to get back home, the girls meet older versions of themselves, become refugees in a mysterious time war, and witness a fight between giant robots. Paper Girls played to excellent critical and audience reception, scoring high on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. But instead of moving forward with the series, Amazon has canceled Paper Girls after only one season.
Despite the show’s cancelation, Legendary Television, one of Paper Girls’ producing companies, will be shopping the show around or trying to find a new home for the series. Legendary Television still believes the show can be successful largely because it centers around strong 3-dimensional female characters. It looks to piggyback off the success of shows like Euphoria and The Sex Lives of College Girls, though it aims more at families than these shows do.
Paper Girls likely suffered in the ratings not only because of this demographic struggle but also because it was competing with many bigger shows with huge marketing campaigns at the time. Despite Paper Girls being a good show, its release may have just been a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s a possibility that it could do better on another streamer.
Why Was Paper Girls Canceled?
Paper Girls was canceled despite putting out all the right signs that it was a good TV show. It scored 90% on Rotten Tomatoes with a surprising Audience Score of 88%. IMDb gave it a 7.3 out of 10. It had some strong comedic actors like Ali Wong and Jason Mantzoukas. And it fell into that genre of cult comic adaptations that add to the success of shows like The Boys, Umbrella Academy, and Invincible. But still, Paper Girls suffered in the ratings.
In fact, it failed to make it onto the Nielsen ratings at all. One can’t say why for certain, but it’s possible that it was just released at the wrong time. The show competed with another of Amazon’s originals, The Rings of Power. This Lord of the Rings spin-off series dominated Amazon’s front page and attempted to drown everything else in media due to its own competition with the Game of Thrones spin-off series House of the Dragon. Paper Girls likely got swept under the rug by the massive marketing campaign Amazon was running on its own site to promote the LOTR series, which made a lot less space for Paper Girls to be seen.
The Rings of Power also affected Paper Girls in another way. Stephany Folsom, who created the series for television, was meant to be the series showrunner but exited during production to work on the LOTR series. Though her leaving the series doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the show's quality, it serves as an example of how much The Rings of Power dominated Amazon’s priorities. It also illustrates the point of how much a quality series can suffer from a lack of attention from its producers. Still, Legendary Television retains its rights to shop the show around, meaning it could find a home with another streamer. If Amazon isn’t willing to invest the time into a quality product, the show might easily have more success if only it were given to a different producer.
Could Netflix Be the Answer?
Paper Girls had everything it takes to be a genuinely good TV show, but its failure may have just been a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Legendary Television successfully moves the show to a different streaming site, that company may invest the time and marketing. Those are the only two things the series may have been missing and needs to be successful.
Where we saw big shows overtake Paper Girls on Amazon, a streamer like Netflix may be able to market the show better. Not only because Netflix is a platform that deals specifically in streaming content, but because of its well-executed marketing algorithm that might put the show in front of the correct users.
Where Amazon might drown its whole site in Rings of Power ads, Netflix more specifically targets users that are more likely to watch the show. It would give the series more space to be seen instead of having the company prioritize 100% of its ad space in favor of another show. The streamer might more directly reach demographics who would be more likely to watch Paper Girls instead of those that are not likely to watch an anchor show that the whole site is based around.
It would also give Paper Girls a chance to be released outside of competition, to be held in the merits of its own style and genre, which might make it more likely to be viewed as well. But if we see a Paper Girls season 2, it won't be for a long time.