According to Deadline, Netflix has decided to cancel plans for a fourth and final season of GLOW due to the various ongoing setbacks related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The final season of GLOW was announced last September, when there was no reason to think the Trump administration would grossly mishandle a pandemic that would cost nearly 210,000 Americans their lives (so far), but now Netflix has apparently decided that it’s simply too risky to make another season of GLOW any time soon. The show had been entirely shot in Los Angeles, which hasn’t handled the virus super well, and the costs were already high because of the large cast, so Deadline says Netflix didn’t think it would end up being worth the various costs for a new season that wouldn’t air until 2022 at the earliest anyway.
Deadline shared a statement from series creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mesch who noted that there are “a lot of shitty things happening in the world that are much bigger than this right now” but that it “still sucks that we don’t get to see these 15 women in a frame together again.” They also gave a shoutout to the whole “cast of weirdo clowns” and “heroic crew,” along with a request for everyone to vote (yes, please do that. Deadline says that “all of the series regulars” have been paid in full, which seems like a pretty good deal given the circumstances. Also, one episode had apparently been filmed before the shutdown back at the beginning of this year, so there is now lost GLOW footage out there that we’ll probably never get to see… just in case you wanted to be a little more bummed about this.
This is the latest in a list of Netflix shows that have been killed by the pandemic after the streaming service decided that there wouldn’t be enough of an audience left to bring them back once things calm down, with previous cancellations including the unexpected end of The Society (which also had to deal with the strict established timeline of the show and the fact that it could no longer be filmed in summer).