While Hollywood writers are celebrating the (likely but not official yet) end of the WGA strike and the fact that they can get back to work soon, Starz has decided to get back to work a little quicker… by rolling out the guillotine and canceling some shows, with one cancellation in particular seeming explicitly cruel to one specific person, given the timing of this news and the assumption that it shouldn’t be too much longer before SAG-AFTRA gets a deal of its own.
Either way, Starz has canceled Blindspotting, Run The World, and Heels, all of which just recently aired their second seasons. The network has also killed The Venery Of Samantha Bird, a new series with Katherine Langford that had started filming before the start of the WGA strike and now will not be resumed—though Variety says that only two episodes hadn’t been shot yet, so the fact that it’s being canceled now suggests that the studios are still going to be spending some time cleaning up the messes they made by refusing to make deals with the unions for so long.
As for Heels, well, at a certain point, someone hypothetically could start to feel bad for star Stephen Amell. When the show’s second season premiered just a few weeks into the SAG-AFTRA strike, Amell openly rebelled against union rules preventing members from promoting struck work, first with cheeky social media posts and then by denouncing the very act of striking in general at a convention appearance. He later tried to walk back those comments, explaining that he was frustrated by the need to strike even though he understood why the strike was happening, and—to his credit—he did later show up on the picket lines in New York.
Now all of that was for a show that got canceled hours after the WGA announced that it had a tentative deal. If nothing else, this should all make it pretty clear just who you’re siding with when you choose management over your fellow workers—whether you’re in Hollywood or a regular job where nobody asks you for bad labor opinions at a comic book convention.
