Another Netflix original series has been canceled. Following the cancellations of Sense8 and The Get Down, Girlboss is the latest original series to be cancelled by the streaming service.
According to TVGuide.com, Girlboss was cancelled after its rookie season due to low ratings. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, addressed the reasoning behind many cancelled shows at the Produced By conference that took place in early June. “Relative to what you spent, are people watching it?… A big expensive show for a huge audience is great. A big, expensive show for a tiny audience is hard even in our model to make that work very long,” he explained.
Britt Robertson played Sophia Marlowe, who is loosely based on NastyGal founder Sophia Amoruso. The series is an adaption of Amoruso’s nonfiction book of the same name. The first season follows Sophia in the early 2000s as she struggled to make ends meet until she creates an online used clothing store, all while dealing with financial, relationship, and friendship issues. The series also starred Ellie Reed, Johnny Simmons, and Alphonso McAuley. Dean Norris, Norm Macdonald, RuPaul Charles, Jim Rash, Louise Fletcher, and Melanie Lynskey all appeared in recurring roles.
Amoruso broke the news through a series of Instagram Stories earlier today. She wrote, “So that Netflix series about my life got canceled. While I’m proud of the work we did, I’m looking forward to controlling my narrative from here on out.” She continued, “It was a good show, and I was privileged to work with incredible talent, but living my life as a caricature was hard even if only for two months. Yes, I can be difficult. No, I’m not a d***. No, someone named Shane never cheated on me. It will be nice to someday tell the story of what’s happened in the last few years. Ppl read the headline, not the correction, I’ve learned.”
While promoting the series in late April, showrunner Kay Cannon spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the difficulties of selling a show about a strong woman. “When I pitched it, they said, ‘You can’t call it Girlboss. Make it more for men’ … Their pitch was, ‘Bring in a guy who teaches her to be the boss,'” she revealed. “That’s when I did not want to do that because then it becomes about gender politics and that’s not what this show is. It would feel like every other show out there that’s in the workplace. It’s very condescending and bulls***.”
Cannon also opened up about where she would like Season 2 to go if the series was renewed. “We would see more of [Sophia] rise. It’s unclear if she’d move to L.A. or not, but we’d see some of the bumps of actually being a boss to people. What we’ll do in the show is this idea of understanding what your strengths and weaknesses are,” she said. “A big weakness of Sophia’s is that she has no business managing people, especially when they’re her friends and how these friends could possibly take advantage of having their very young boss be their friend at the same time. We’ll explore all of that.”
Cannon also worked as an executive producer on the series alongside Amoruso and Charlize Theron.