Hollywood Reporter: ‘Degrassi’ Revival Scrapped at HBO Max

Story from Hollywood Reporter:

School is out at HBO Max: The streamer has scuttled its planned revival of Degrassi.

Like a number of other projects, the Degrassi revival is a casualty of post-merger cutbacks at Warner Bros. Discovery. The show scored a series order in January 2022, a few months before the merger between Discovery and WarnerMedia became final.

WildBrain, which owns the Degrassi franchise, was producing the new series, which, like its predecessors, would have followed students and teachers at the titular school who are “living in the shadow of events that both bind them together and tear them apart,” per the show’s logline. Lara Azzopardi (The Bold Type) and Julia Cohen (Riverdale, A Million Little Things) were tapped as showrunners. (Cohen is also the showrunner of ABC’s midseason drama The Company You Keep.)

As part of the deal, HBO Max also acquired the 14 seasons of Degrassi: The Next Generation, which ran from 2001 to 2015. Those episodes remain on the streamer.

Production on the series did begin as planned during the summer but then paused. A statement from WildBrain says “discussions concerning the contract with WarnerMedia are ongoing,” hinting that the company may try to find a new outlet for the series.

Warner Bros. Discovery has made a number of cuts to programming targeted at kids and families in recent months, including the cancellation of Gordita Chronicles and animated series Little Ellen at HBO Max and dropping several library series and hundreds of older episodes of Sesame Street from the streamer. When it canceled Gordita Chronicles in late July, HBO Max said in a statement that “live-action kids and family programming will not be part of our programming focus in the immediate future.”

Warner Bros. Discovery also infamously scrapped a finished Batgirl film that was to have debuted on HBO Max and J.J. Abrams’ pricey HBO series Demimonde, and has laid off dozens of employees as it seeks billions of dollars in cost savings following the merger. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Degrassi cancellation, also noted that the company shelved an animated Charlotte’s Web miniseries co-produced by Sesame Workshop.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav defended the cuts on the company’s quarterly earnings call Thursday: “We didn’t take one show off a platform that would help us in any way,” he said. Going forward, Zaslav vowed to “replace those shows with content that has a chance to be more successful, and have a larger audience.”

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