Bad news, royal watchers (by proxy): Ryan Murphy’s new season of historical throwdown series Feud, centered on the messy divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, is apparently no more. FX’s John Landgraf broke the news today, announcing that, “As far as I know, it’s not active right now.”
The Di and Charles season of Feud was still in its planning stages, complete with rumors that Matthew Goode and Rosamunde Pike had signed on to play the royal couple. Ultimately, though, Landgraf said the network just wasn’t confident in the material that was being developed for the second season of the show, which has frequently walked the tricky line between revealing human drama and something a bit less savory.
And given that the first season of Feud—enjoyable as it was—managed to get FX embroiled in a pretty nasty lawsuit, even with only a single member of its subjects (Olivia De Havilland) alive, we can’t say we entirely blame the network for shying away from a story with far more immediacy and potential for hurt feelings. As Murphy himself noted last year, the entire core of the series’ focus is human pain and discomfort, and even if the series ended up being a lot less schadenfreude-filled than its original logline might have suggested, it’s still a pretty rough putt in terms of not coming off as ghouls.
In any case, this doesn’t mean we’ll never see this (or another) version of Feud again; although Murphy’s departure for the money-filled fields of Netflix make this all a bit dicier, it’s worth noting that American Crime Story: Katrina, long thought moribund, is back on track for production at the network, so anything is possible.