GLOW Creators Weigh In On Show’s Cancelled Season, Lack of Closure

The planned fourth and final season of GLOW was a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the show’s creators have touched on the show being canceled mid-production. As you may recall, Netflix canceled the show and scuttled the final season in October of 2020, months after the season’s production went into pause due to the shutdown of the industry due to the pandemic. The additional costs of trying to produce the show and safely handle the wrestling aspect were said to be the major factor.

Speaking with THR to promote their new series, Apple TV+’s Roar, creatores Liz Flavine and Carly Mensch discussed the cancellation and you can see a couple quotes below:

Flahive on the show’s cancellation: “We knew stuff about GLOW would come up when we’re talking about another show. We were canceled during the height of a pandemic, when there were so many horrible losses in the world. We were incredibly sad not to get to make that final season in a pretty profound way. But things were just so much bigger than that. They always are. But, at that moment, there was just so much loss and change. There are many times when the place you start making a show changes as you continue to make the show. I think it’s fair to say that kind of happened at Netflix with us. Also, initially, I think we had a really great creative time there. We got to do what we wanted with that show and make it exactly as we intended to make it. That’s something a lot of people making their first show don’t get to say. It’s a different place now. And I don’t think we’re the only people to have felt that change. It’s weird. I still think about those characters. I still think about that season every once in a while. Like my brain tricks me into thinking, in a weird grief way, that I’m still gonna get to make it. We both have that weird phantom limb feeling about it.”

Mensch on the final season not happening: “It’s an unfinished, unsettled feeling. There was definitely no closure. Two years later, we’re in the acceptance phase. It happened. But there’s also this strange dissonance because we got very far into making that season. We wrote most of it. We filmed two episodes. Sometimes, when you’re making something, you forget that the world hasn’t seen it. It feels so real. I feel like it exists. And then I remember it’s just a private version that never made it — like a stillbirth. Liz and I sometimes take solace in the fact that it’s the most underdog move ever to get canceled in the same fashion as the show that you’re based on. The original GLOW, in the eighties, got ripped from the airwaves ahead of its time. We’re at least in good company.”