Ah, the un-renewal: Is there a more ignominious fate for a TV show, or its creators? You get the go-ahead to make more of your thing, get excited to plot out new storylines and character arcs, and then, whoops: Lucy pulls the corporate football away, and you go flying off into the miserable distance.
The practice—which got a lot of press during the COVID-19 lockdowns—has been seeing a resurgence of late, as various Hollywood studios have shrugged their shoulders at the current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and declared “Hey, whadda ya gonna do?” (Pay your writers and actors a living wage? Who can say.)
Anyway: The un-renewal reaper has now come for Pitch Perfect TV series Bumper In Berlin, which will no longer be going forward with a second season on Peacock. The series, developed by Megan Amram and Elizabeth Banks, centers—as the title suggests—on Adam DeVine’s Pitch Perfect character Bumper, who finds himself moving to Germany after one of his songs takes off in, you guessed it, Munich. The series co-starred Sarah Hyland, Jameela Jamil, Lera Abova, and Flula Borg. After releasing its six initial episodes in a single burst in November of 2022, the series picked up a renewal in January of 2023, complete with a bunch of very effusive quotes (“We can’t wait to dive further into this new hit with Peacock audiences,” “We look forward to taking the next season to new heights,” etc.) that we now know to interpret with an invisible (but obvious) “Hey, maybe!”
Previous victims of the un-renewal bug include The Peripheral and A League Of Their Own, both at Amazon. According to Deadline, season 2 of Bumper In Berlin hadn’t even had pre-production work done on it by the time the WGA strike hit, causing it to miss its planned return window; the phrase “content pipeline” is also used, in case you were feeling overly optimistic about the state of art at the moment.
