Lisa Hanawalt, Creator and Executive Producer of Tuca & Bertie:

>“I originally created Tuca & Bertie for Netflix, but when they cancelled it after just one season, we fought to get the series picked up at Warner’s Adult Swim network. The women-led series had been a cult hit and a critical darling—the Warner execs knew it needed advertising support and time to grow viewers in the male-dominated adult animation space. But the merger went through right before the most recent season launched, and almost everyone who worked on the Tuca & Bertie marketing team was laid off. Then several of the show’s main executives at Adult Swim and HBO Max left in the turmoil. Planned marketing projects to promote the new season didn’t happen. Then we learned the show had been cancelled. It’s already harder for shows centered on women, and this merger cost us the support we needed to thrive.”

Claudia Forestieri, Creator and Executive Producer of Gordita Chronicles:

>“I got into television to counter the negative mainstream stereotypes about Latino communities and tell stories like Gordita Chronicles, which features a young Dominican girl who immigrates with her family to Miami. The showrunner and I did everything in our power to set the show up for success, and the first season was showered with positive reviews and strong viewership numbers. But after the merger, HBO Max was given a new mandate from its Discovery leadership to cut costs and Gordita Chronicles was cancelled just five weeks after first airing, and will now even be removed from the platform. The studio executives claimed the cancellation reflected HBO ‘rebranding’—by implication, away from shows about Latino families. This merger has provided pretty stark and immediate evidence that industry consolidation not only harms diversity and inclusion, but can also contribute to the erasure of U.S. Latinos.”

Moisés Zamora, Creator and Executive Producer of Whistleblower:

>“I created a drama that focused on women lawyers and advocates who fought against a culture of sexual harassment and corruption in the U.S. military, achieving historic gains after the murder of Mexican American soldier Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood. After a competitive bidding process with multiple outlets, I sold Whistleblower to HBO Max in February 2021. During development, we received only compliments from our executives. The leads were three BIPOC women, and it was a story I was excited to tell. Despite it all, the series was cancelled soon after the merger, before it went into production. The press speculation is that the new company is focusing more on what’s seen as ‘Middle America’ content. But Black, Asian, and Latinx communities are Middle America too.”

Lol. No one watched this show anyways. It was always doomed

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They all sound like they're sociology majors from Berkeley.

Better to have gotten picked up and cancelled than to have never gotten picked up at all. 3 seasons is more than a lot of shows get, not every show is gonna go on a Simpsons run.

I liked season 3 more than season 2.

While I agree with this article, Chad was not a funny show and I’m amazed it even got a 2nd season

Oh god I forgot about that show. I never watched it but the commercials looked fucking awful.

Zaslav had this weird idea that all of the "family oriented" content including kids shows and cartoons should be on Discovery+ and anything like that on HBO Max was dead weight. He probably took one look at it and saw it was a cartoon and axed it immediately.

All those statements are so weird.

It was moderately popular. I think a lot of this seething was because one of the characters joked about "4chan boys" or some shit, but it was leagues better than Bojack.

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First I’ve heard the show is cancelled. I really enjoyed Tuca and Bertie!

Well congrats on never being hired by WBD again I guess?

Probably other media companies as well since who wants to deal with bad press over shows no one watched?

Naw, it was legit good.

Like you said, I'm sure there's a lot of valid points about HBO Warner or whatever it's called these days not doing the show any favors. My wife and I honestly didn't even know S3 of Tuca and Bertie started to release episodes weekly until it was like 6 weeks in.

That being said, I think it sidesteps a bigger reason for the show being cancelled, and I'm saying this as someone who loved S1 of Tuca and Bertie and thought S2 was pretty good, but S3 of the show was a huge step down. It felt like they ran out of ideas fast and didn't know what to do with the characters and leaned on making things wackier and wackier to the point where the humor stopped being relatable and just felt weird for weirdness sake. Honestly not sure I'd be all that excited about a S4 even if it wasn't cancelled.

Does the show end on a cliffhanger?

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It doesn't end on a cilff hanger, but it's a sit-com type show that didnt wrap anything up.

While there are some valid points in the article and I agree with the overall message, Tuca and Bertie got 3 seasons, which is more than many other shows get, if they see the light of day at all. Idk why you’d squander the good will you might’ve had from that by trashing a service. Good luck getting hired for future projects there or even other services. Who wants to be associated with a negative Nancy that brings you bad press?

I’m gonna go ahead and say a lot of shows, even some really good ones, peak within the first 2 or 3 seasons

Well, I think that the cancellation and quality issue of the show are a case of correlation, not causation.

Sure, because people are dying for their work to be turned into tax write off by Zazlav.

I don’t think that by Tiffany Haddish “allegedly” in the middle of a molestation suit really helped either…

Lol. WBD is still one of a handful of big players who greenlight the sort of television that people actually watch and also have decades of production experience unlike Netflix and Amazon, etc…. only a moron wouldn’t want to work with them if offered the chance. Even Lisa Hanawalt would but knows that it isn’t going to happen.

Its such a shame, Tuca and Bertie was such a great show. At least it ended with the characters in a mostly good place.

Yeah I knew it was over the second that story broke and she apologized for it. It was an interesting little show but that was the final nail in the coffin. There’s no way a show about that kinda stuff keeps going when one of the main cast admits to that stuff.

WBD, AMC, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Netflix have all cancelled completed seasons as tax right-offs in the last 3 months.

https://deadline.com/2023/01/write-offs-completed-seasons-tv-series-experts-weigh-in-on-trend-1235242805/

I think it’s also safe to say that no show will ever get a Simpsons run.

I am personally happy Tuca & Bertie is gone. No amount of marketing would make the show interesting or funny. If you never seen the show just watch the Netflix trailer and see if it’s funny to you. Tuca & Bertie is for a nitch fan base from a bigger fan base that likes Bo jack horseman.

Yes it’s always a drag when entertainment business things happen to decent people in the entertainment business. But hey… as they say; that’s entertainment business!

[The British, gesticulating emphatically]

I totally agree with this but I also think the short series model is often being used in the wrong places. Some shows will meander on for way too long while other series are too good for, or too rushed with, the new normal of 10 episode seasons. An example: I'm really enjoying How I Met Your Father being a prime target for it. 10 episodes in the first season was great to test the water and make sure the story was viable and the group had chemistry. Now that season 2 is airing, I'd love to have a few longer seasons while still having a target of only 3 or 4 seasons to keep the story tight.

You know you can just ignore shows you don't enjoy right? No need to celebrate dozens if not hundreds of people's hard work being canned due to studio politics

everyone is cancelling shows as tax write-off's, except for D+ all of them have cancelled completed shows and the only reason D+ didn't have any cancellation yet, is bcoz all of them were 150mill+ budgeted Marvel/Star Wars limited series (except for Mandalorian which isn't limited).

no, WBD announced they are pulling out of Animation entirely and will keep IP/ well performing cartoons only

Tiffany Haddish was never funny. If she was she wouldnt have truly been “cancelled” regardless of what losers on twitter had to say. Look at Louis CK

She’s right that WB is killing cartoons, regardless what you can say about the merits of T&B

Eh show was weird

Tuca was try hard quirky horseshit compared to bojack

Jesus, do you have to make everything an issue of race/sex? They weren't good series. If they were and they were profitable this wouldn't have happened. Take responsibility for your own issues

i’m confused. are you saying Louis CK isn’t funny? Because FX’s Louie was definitely cancelled as a direct result of his misconduct

He’s still performing and selling out shows unfortunately, so take that cancellation with a grain of salt

There are more posters ITT than Tuca & Bertie viewers, yet it keeps getting renewed when WB is cancelling everything else left and right

Netflix has been cutting their spending on animation too....... Zaslav is not the only one who thinks animation is dead weight.

Terrible show

Simpsons already did it.

Considering most of the animated Netflix shows are absolute dogshit, that's not much of a loss. The world could do with a few less Paradise PDs and Inside Jobs.

Just fucking wonderful that this is where Venture Bros ended up.

In other words, they need a network willing to pay them to produce shit that people don’t want to watch. Newsflash: commercial distributors who want to stay in business like to produce content that attracts viewers. Prior WB executives proved repeatedly that they didn’t know how to make good profit-motivated decisions.

Let’s stop call it cancelling and start calling it holding people accountable for their actions, as it’s always been.

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It's like, "you guys realize you're making cartoons, right? You're not social crusaders, you're cartoonists."

I’m gonna miss speckle… but damn if the pedophile/grooming issues didn’t kill the show for me and others that liked.

It's almost like the best thing you can do is not trust corporations with your creative work

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We can ignore them, and we can also express disdain for them. It’s the internet. People got opinions. Just because an opinion of a show is negative doesn’t mean it cannot be expressed, especially when the discussion is about the show getting cancelled, where those opinions are hella relevant.

I watched S1 Tuca n Berry. Sorry, doesn’t matter how many people worked on it, for me it was literal trash.

I agree it only existed due to BoJack Horseman, which also was pretty bad overall.

Victim mentality much 🙄

If a show is trash, it’s trash. The colour of the persons involved in its creation is moot. Blaming literally everything on alleged racism and sexism is getting real old real quick

It sucks this is forever associated with her name because everyone involved already dropped it. She was accused of grooming, but it turned out to just be a very inappropriate sketch they were working on, something like "The world through the POV of a pedophile." She felt shitty about it and admitted it wasn't funny and crossed a line, the families involved basically said she's been nothing but great so figured they were wrong and dropped the suit.

Sucks that some stupid, unfunny jokes now has her labeled a groomer, and it seems to be the first thing people think of when they hear her name. Hopefully, people forget about this one, like the Aziz Ansari nonsense from 2018.

Elaborate?

Meh. It's a business and they're your employer. They exist to make money, not to "support" you.

I’ve literally never met a single person in real life who watches this show, it wouldn’t be cancelled if people watched it, there are like five people whining about this on Reddit (including the creator) and yet I see stories about Tuca and Bertie constantly. I just don’t understand, shows get cancelled when people don’t watch them, that’s what happens, get over it.

Yea he was definitely postponed but not cancelled.

Well Tuca & Bertie was a fantastic cartoon that continued and evolved what Hanawalt did with Bojack Horsman and her works in other mediums. So its quality as a cartoon for sure wasn't the reason for the cancelation. I'm not saying that misogyny is the reason either. But I can see how women that make quality products in a pretty much male dominated industry and still get their shows canceled will look for answers in the social status-quo

Goes to show that this project was more than just another job for her if she doesn't care about the politics of it all. Well by just seeing the series itself you can feel that it's a passion project for the creators. A really bumming cancelation, especially as it seems they had much more to tell about these characters and world

Art, notorious for not trying to say anything about the world we live in.

Nah Tuca & Bertie was fucking fantastic. It was also fucking weird, but fantastic just the same. Especially as an animation series that fully utilize the medium in creative ways that are rarely seen in mainstream series.

They thought their shows would survive when ATHF, Metalocalypse, Squidbilies, The Venture Bros, Mr. Pickles, SuperJail, and others were cancelled before the merger?

Sounds like you just have bad taste

I'm so sad! One of my favorite shows.

Capitalism at it's finest.

the first author at least gives a reasonable, understandable - but not agreeable, you can't have unlimited time for your show to find its footing, it's a businness not charity- take; the other two, between hearsays and suppositions, imply that they got axed because the new nazi regime wants inferior races out. Yikes

Please go research the Tiffany Haddish and her brother issues. I also don’t believe it was only “her brother” at fault; the mother of those two minors trusted Tiffany who forced them into the predatory scenario.

TV shows have famously never commented on the current social climate