Good Girls Revolt creator says Amazon didn’t care about the show, Amazon disagrees

The team behind Good Girls Revolt isn’t going quietly into the good night following Amazon’s cancellation of the series. Creator Dana Calvo tells The Hollywood Reporter that by the streamer’s own standards/metrics, her ’60s journalism show was “a hit.” Apparently, Amazon takes a couple of things into account: a show’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score—which was 96% fresh for Good Girls Revolt—and its ability to ratchet up sales. Calvo says her show was no slouch in that second department either: “Of the people driven from the entertainment sections to the commerce section, we were driving 55 percent, which was phenomenal.”

Amazon didn’t pony up those figures, in case you’re wondering. Instead, Calvo told BuzzFeed via Twitter that she got the data from Sony—Good Girls’ production company—which picked it up from streaming monitor site Symphony Advanced Media.

But it sounds like Calvo doesn’t think her show could performed well enough for Amazon at all. She goes on to tell THR that Amazon Studios was indifferent to her adaptation of Lynn Povich’s book.

What we hadn’t factored in is that [Amazon Studios head] Roy Price just doesn’t care for the show. He’s representative of the Amazon culture in that he’s just impenetrable.

All I know is that in the [season two] pitch, he asked us to refer to the characters by the actors’ names because he didn’t know the characters’ names.

Now, THR cites “insiders” who say that Price was pretty hands off about the show, skipping the premiere and reportedly saying it wouldn’t be an awards contender. But Joe Lewis, Amazon Studios head of comedy and drama development, tells a different story. Lewis says Amazon had “had high hopes for Good Girls Revolt, and have tremendous respect for the creators, cast and Sony, but I can tell you that the Symphony numbers being reported are wrong and that the show wasn’t performing at the levels we had hoped for—either in total viewership or completion rates.”

But the revolution might be televised elsewhere, as THR also reports ABC, Freeform, USA Network, Bravo and Hulu are all eyeing the series for a second season.