Friday Night TV Murder Pile: Girls On The Bus and High School are both dead

The TV Reaper has done its dark work again this week, this time swinging its television series-ending scythe hard in the world of streaming. Per THR and Variety, at least two streaming shows are getting the axe this weekend with the usual “it’s Friday night, let’s murder some TV shows before the long weekend” energy: Amazon Freevee’s Tegan & Sara origin story High School, and Max’s The Girls On The Bus.

The more of these kinds of cancellations you write about—and we’ve written about a lot of them at this point—the more you’re struck by how dispiritingly callous this whole process can be. High School, for instance (which was created by Clea DuVall, working alongside the Quin sisters from their memoir of the same name, and starring twins Railey and Seazynn Gilliland) had actually been all-but-guaranteed a second season by Amazon, to the point that DuVall had apparently been given the green light to put together a “mini-room” and start assembling scripts. But then—and we’re just straight-up quoting THR here, for the full depressing impact, “Ultimately, sources say the completion rate for High School left Freevee and Amazon execs little choice but to cancel the series despite the fact that scripts for an entire second season had already been completed.” Pour one out tonight for the poor, helpless Amazon execs, huh?

Meanwhile, The Girls On The Bus will similarly be confined to a single season, which debuted back in March 2024. The series, about four women journalists covering presidential campaigns, had a ridiculously strong pedigree, reuniting Supergirl star Melissa Benoist with Berlanti TV, and was co-created by The Vampire Diaries’ Julie Plec. (Working with journalist Amy Chozick, on whose memoirs it’s loosely based.) The series also starred Carla Gugino, Christina Elmore, Natasha Behnam, and Brandon Scott. The cancellation comes after the series spent like five years getting bounced around like a pinball between networks and streamers before ever making it to air: Originally set up at Netflix way back in 2019, it got short-circuited by the COVID-19 lockdowns, landing briefly at The CW before being filtered into Max. And now it’s dead, another victim of the Friday night curse, buried between a mixture of critical irritation and streamer indifference.