Netflix decommissions Grand Army
The single-season series was created by Katie Cappiello and based off her play Slut
The Grand Army is no more, as Netflix announced today that it’s wiping the single-season teen drama off the map. This is per Variety, which reports that the series—created by Katie Cappiello, and based on her play Slut—won’t be going forward with a second season, despite garnering relatively strong reviews from critics. (You can read our own review of the series, penned by Aramide Tinubu, and praising the show’s straightforward and unblinking handling of teen life, right here.)
The series starred Odessa A’zion as high schooler Joey Del Marco, alongside Odley Jean, Amir Bageria, Maliq Johnson, and Amalia Yoo, all playing kids at different levels of acceptance of the harsh realities of high school existence. Set in a Brooklyn high school, Grand Army tackled (apologies for the past tense) any number of topics that are part of teens lives in 2020, from crafting new identities, to racism, to wrestling with rape culture and the COVID-19 pandemic. Cappiello served as an executive producer on the series, writing or co-writing the majority of its 9 first-season episodes, which arrived on Netflix in October of last year.
It’s been a belt-tightening moment for Netflix of late; the streaming service has made a few high-profile cutbacks in recent weeks, most notably canceling (or “failing to renew,” or however you want to phrase it) its Mark Millar superhero project Jupiter’s Legacy. It’s not clear why Grand Army—which, while well shot, wasn’t doing anything especially expensive-looking in terms of staging—wasn’t granted the usual couple-of-seasons grace notes that were once synonymous with Netflix’s handling of its original content.