Hot on the heels of the news that Mike Flanagan is departing Netflix in a new exclusive deal with Amazon Studios comes the unfortunate but not-so-surprising confirmation that "The Midnight Club" has been canceled.
Unlike Flanagan's previous Netflix efforts, "The Haunting of Hill House," "The Haunting of Bly Manor," "Midnight Mass," and the upcoming "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Midnight Club" was not meant to be a miniseries. Co-created by Flanagan and Leah Fong, the show, per the official Netflix synopsis, centers on "a hospice for terminally ill young adults," where "eight patients come together every night at midnight to tell each other stories – and make a pact that the next of them to die will give the group a sign from the beyond." It's based on the book of the same name by Christopher Pike, but the central premise of teens meeting to tell stories allowed for adaptations of other Pike stories to be featured.
The Wrap reports that streaming ratings for "The Midnight Club" may have played into its cancellation. It slipped out of the Netflix Top 10 after three weeks and apparently did not build up enough viewership to justify the show's cost. It's unclear if Flanagan's departure for Amazon Studios was also a factor, or if it was the other way around and the show's cancellation helped lead to him leaving his longtime streaming home for a new partnership that will see his projects headed to Prime Video.
Twitter May Answer Your Lingering Questions
Season 1 of "The Midnight Club" ended with a cliffhanger and some lingering questions that were meant to be answered further down the line in the series. With season 2 now off the table at Netflix, fans may have to settle for Flanagan revealing the intended outcome of the show's storylines on Twitter.
"I promised everybody at Comic-Con yesterday that I'd put up all the answers to the central mysteries on Twitter, which I will honor," Flanagan told The Wrap after the annual convention in New York this October. "But yeah, ['The Midnight Club'] was designed to carry forward and we made the decision in the writers' room not to reveal two of our kind of bigger existential secrets of the show so that we'd have something to say in the second season."
This jibes with what Flanagan has said in interviews elsewhere. After the first season of "The Midnight Club" dropped earlier this year, he told Variety:
"This was designed to be ongoing. I don't know if it will. We'll see how it goes and we probably won't know for another month or so what Netflix wants to do. But it was very much designed to continue. Pike has 80 books, so we have a lot of unused material to pull from… We also didn't answer some of the bigger questions of the season. Those answers exist, but were meant to be for the next season. If there isn't one, I'll put them up on Twitter. Then we'll at least all be able to talk about it."
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