Apple TV Plus' My Glory Was I Had Such Friends no longer has a friend in Jennifer Garner

In today’s dose of irony: Apple TV+’s long-germinating series My Glory Was I Had Such Friends appears to have lost both a friend and the potential for glory. Per Deadline, star Jennifer Garner pulled out of the series for J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production banner due to scheduling conflicts, leading the streamer to opt-out of moving forward with production.

Based on Amy Silverstein’s 2017 memoir of the same name, My Glory Was I Had Such Friends follows a woman who leans on her unique and powerful community of female friends while preparing to receive a life-saving heart transplant. The series was written and executive produced by Julia Brownell, who replaced the film’s initial writer (and recent Garner collaborator, having written the script for 2021's The Tribes Of Palos Verdes) Karen Croner. Bad Robot first acquired the rights to the book before it was even released during a competitive situation in 2017; the project received a straight-to-series order in 2018.

Although reps for Apple, Bad Robot, WBTV, and Garner declined to comment on the news, a Deadline source shares that “a small writers room has been working on additional scripts” and that a plan is in place to “have multiple scripts ready to present to potential buyers when the project hits the marketplace.”

The ix-nay of My Glory Was I Had Such Friends marks the second canning to befall a Bad Robot production, after the planned HBO series Demimonde, which was set to be Abrams’ first original TV series since 2008, had also received a big ticket straight-to-series order in 2018. Production faltered after rumored budget issues—supposedly, Bad Robot held firm on a $250 million budget for the project even as Warner Bros. Television and HBO looked to cut costs. To put things in perspective, even HBO’s gargantuan Game Of Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon cost less than $200 million—such a hefty fine on a series that doesn’t involve a well-loved trademark tends to raise studio eyebrows.

Although the hold-ups on My Glory Was I Had Such Friends seem slightly different, the update does point to a potentially troubling trend for the studio. Even given the holes in the ship, however, there are still some signs of promise—the studio’s horror-leaning reboot of DC Comics’ Constantine appears to still be “going strong.”