Netflix can cancel The Midnight Club, but it can’t stop Mike Flanagan from tweeting out all its secrets
Mike Flanagan answered all the fans' questions about the now-canceled second season of The Midnight Club
Aux News Mike Flanagan
Yesterday was, let’s say, a tumultuous day for the long-standing relationship between TV horror mastermind Mike Flanagan and his old pals at Netflix. First, news broke that Flanagan and production partner Trevor Macy were jumping ship from the home of The Haunting Of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and more, signing a new deal with Amazon’s Prime Video to create emotionally resonant frights for Jeff Bezos and his ilk, instead. Causality on this stuff is tricky, but it then certainly looked like Netflix responded to this move by canceling Flanagan’s latest show, The Midnight Club, despite the fact that Flanagan and his co-writers had left lots of juicy cliffhangers embedded in the show’s first season.
But never fear, Midnight Club fans: A little thing like a pesky cancellation isn’t going to stop Flanagan from letting you know what would have happened to all the show’s characters in season 2. (Given that the series is about terminally ill teenagers who tell scary stories to help each other cope with the very real, very imminent threat of death, “what happens” tends to be some pretty somber stuff, mind you.) Keeping a promise he made months ago (when it first became clear Midnight Club might not necessarily score a renewal), Flanagan has now deployed an extensive blog post, outlining everything he had planned for the show’s second season, including plot reveals, character relationships, and which of Christopher Pike’s novels would have been adapted for a second run.
We won’t dip into all the various spoilers here, but we will note that Flanagan is being extremely sincere about his desire to explain exactly what the show was up to, and was going to be up to, in a hypothetical second season. It’s the kind of candor you generally don’t get from showrunners—because, obviously, it completely murders the chances of a show ever getting a revival picking up on these themes—but Flanagan seems pretty confident in his position at the moment, and in his dedication to giving fans the answers the show itself is no longer capable of providing. (It also sounds like fans were in for a very sweet ending that would have played on a lot of the themes that have run all throughout Flanagan’s Netflix work; it’s a shame they’ll have to exist only unofficially as part of his canon.)
19 Comments
Weird. I would not have pegged that as a multi-season series. Any cliffhanger-y type stuff just seemed like typical horror “ooh this isn’t actually over” late-story stinger type stuff.
The terminal nature of the leads didn’t leave a lot of room for a long run, unless they started rotating in new cast.
Based on the read of Flanagan’s post, it did seem like the plan was to cycle in new cast (while reusing the original cast in the Club stories- for instance, Anya was going to reappear in one of Ilonka’s).
This is insane. Exactly how many seasons do we need of teens with cancer. It’s borderline morbid after, like, three.
I dunno, it kinda read like it would have just been the one other to me. Ends with the last remaining kid telling the story of the club to the new kids.
I watched it thinking it was a single run, and kept thinking “dang, how are they gonna wrap this all up?” only to find it was intended as a multi-season thing. Which is the first I think of Flanagan’s shows to do that, so that definitely didn’t help the confusion.
Yeah it seemed like a bunch of characters were likely about to die so I figured anything unsolved was just symbolic
This was the first of his shows I didn’t love. Maybe just a different target audience though.
It’s been diminishing returns for me each time, albeit still finding things to like about each installment (Midnight Mass, despite its avalanche of punishing, nobody-told-him-to-stop monologues, delivered on the goods when it finally got there). This was the first one where we dipped after episode 2. Cabinet of Curiosities simply scratched the itch better (as did Chucky, which in all good faith I can’t recommend if you’re not a diehard fan of the little guy, since he and Jennifer Tilly are the only things carrying it).
Hard agree. Loved Hill House, but his stuff just got progressively slower and increasingly sleep-inducing. I wish him luck with Amazon. Seeing how few Amazon shows actually trend the charts, he’s going to need it.
Damn. A whole bunch of opinions I don’t agree with. Midnight Mass was a huge uptick from Bly Manor and there plenty of good/fun actors doing good work on Chucky.
this was the only one I thought was pretty good throughout, the others I thought ran outta steam super quick (or were so boring)
There’s a clear difference in the qualities of the shows when he is directing all the episodes and when he’s not. Hill House and Midnight Mass are way more focused and solid than Bly Manor or Midnight Club.
Yeah I’ve mostly enjoyed his Annual Netflix Holiday Series to this point but ran out of interest on this after three episodes.
I enjoyed the show. I think the target demographic was models for the United Colors of Benetton.
At first it sounded cool. It basically sounded like a more mature “Are you afraid of the dark”, but with an overall main plot as well that connected all story tellers.Yet then I found myself more interested in the place they were at, the history, etc than I was the stories. Found myself fast forwarding through them. Then I just stopped watching.
Seems more like he “tumblred” out all its secrets but I guess “tweet” sounds better? Did he also tweet? The death of Twitter is going to be hard on journalists, they’ll have to talk about blogging again
I wish more people did this – reward fans who were loyal to your show by letting them know the broad strokes of the story remaining. Would definitely make me more willing to check out that person’s work in the future earlier than I typically do (generally wait until a show is a bonafide hit or has been on long enough that it has or will get a satisfying ending).
I believe the showrunner on Carnivale revealed what was going to happen in later seasons after the show was cancelled.