Tatiana Maslany says She-Hulk: Attorney At Law has likely been thrown out of court

If we had a nickel for every time a show about an improbable creature spending time in a courtroom was abandoned by its studio, we’d have two nickels… which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. First it was Warner Bros.’ Coyote Vs. Acme, which was notoriously shelved this past fall for a measly tax write-off. Now, it’s Marvel’s 2022 breakout hit She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, which will likely become the latest victim of the studio’s supremely dumb TV-making method.

While the show hasn’t officially been canceled, its star, Tatiana Maslany, isn’t holding out much hope for a return. In a recent appearance on Twitch gameshow Codenames Live (via Polygon), Maslany was asked whether or not she saw a She-Hulk season two in the cards. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “I think we blew our budget, and Disney was like, ‘no thanks!’”

It’s not as though She-Hulk’s story was left in a place where a second season wouldn’t be possible. That door was left open in the (divisive) season finale and head writer Jessica Gao has said she already has ideas for a second season before. The show was also fairly well received. (It landed solidly in the middle of our ranking of every Marvel TV show, for example.)

The reason for this slow ghosting is more likely due to the larger problems facing Marvel Studios right now; namely, the fact that they’ve approached their massive TV output in a way no one’s every tried to approach TV before—for good reason. In an extensive report from The Hollywood Reporter, it was revealed that the studio was eschewing traditional speculative pilots and instead jumping into series with no real forethought, swapping seasoned showrunners for execs from the film side with minimal experience, patching mistakes in post-production instead of in the moment, and so on. According to a different report from Variety, the budget for a few single episodes of She-Hulk occasionally grew to a whopping $25 million, way more than the final season of Game Of Thrones, for example, but without even half of its cultural impact.

Maslany’s situation is a great example of what’s really being lost as the once star-making studio continues to flounder. “I’ve got nothing going on. You can find me on Instagram, not posting,” she said on the stream. “I’ve got no job.”