HBO Max is going to go ahead and un-revive Degrassi, actually, thanks

Ten months after it announced that it would be reviving long-running, beloved Canadian teen drama Degrassi, HBO Max has made a stunning announcement this evening: Nah.

This is per Deadline, which reports that the Degrassi revival has been the latest series to get cut by the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streaming service, even though it was announced with a full series order back in January. Of course, January 2022 was a very different time for a then-still-un-Discovery’d Warner Bros., i.e., back before incoming CEO David Zaslav started taking his chainsaw to the company’s various streaming offerings.

The Degrassi revival—which would have brought the long-running soap back for the first time since Degrassi: The Next Class ended back in 2017—was being handled on the creative side by The Bold Type’s Lara Azzopardi and Riverdale alum Julia Cohen. Shooting was supposedly set to commence in Toronto over the summer, with an eye on a 2023 release; we can’t tell, from reports, whether Degrassi studio WildBrain held off on filming due to sensing the oncoming earthquakes surrounding the Warner Bros./Discovery merger, or if this is another example of Zaslav tossing out existing footage because it didn’t meet his exacting (i.e., very obviously lucrative in an immediate, work-free way) standards for streaming content.

As THR notes, Zaslav lately re-iterated his ongoing defense of the many cuts he’s made to HBO Max’s library—including massive attacks on its animation department—with some comments to investors that were probably meant as straight talk, but which came off more as “being kind of a dick.” To wit: “We didn’t take one show off a platform that would help us in any way,” which is definitely the sort of way you talk when your company is facing an increasingly angry revolt from the creators who actually make the content you sell.