These are bleak times in telly. Not only is there a writers and actors strike in the US – which is likely to create a dearth of new shows in a few months time – but streaming giants have become increasingly trigger-happy when it comes to cancelling shows just as they’re building momentum.
Willow; Lockwood & Co; Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies; 1899; The Chair; Star Trek: Prodigy; American Gigolo; Ziwe; the Gossip Girl reboot – all have been axed from their respective platforms in recent months, many only one season in.
However, the bigwigs at Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ et al didn’t account for the fans, who, in some cases, have mobilised with extraordinary force to save them. It’s a new wave of fan activism, and it is proving effective.
Last month, Netflix’s fantasy series Warrior Nun (which follows the exploits of Ava, a woman recruited into a demon-slaying nunnery, of course) was granted a reprieve after its 2022 cancellation.
It is just the latest in a series of TV shows brought back from the dead thanks to months of dedicated campaigning, involving everything from virtual conventions to renting billboards in front of the Netflix headquarters.
The most high profile of these – and, arguably, the campaign that set the template for those to come – is Sanditon. Based on the unfinished book by Jane Austen, the 2019 ITV show ended its first season on a cliffhanger of sorts, denying viewers the traditional happy ending between its two leads.
“We really thought that we would get this happily ever after, but we didn’t,” superfan Juliet Creese says. But ITV, and US partner Masterpiece PBS, had already indicated that it wasn’t planning to renew the show, leaving dedicated viewers extremely hot under their bonnets. “There was absolute uproar… you know, Jane would be turning in her grave,” says Creese. “There was just absolute fury.”
In response, the fanbase got to work. Though not a habitual Twitter user, Creese, who lives in the West Midlands, ventured online to read what others were saying about the show and found herself recruited into the Strategy Group (or SS2) - that is, a team of seven international members who orchestrated the #SaveSanditon campaign for the show’s global fandom.
“All our communication between the Strategy Group [was done] within Twitter DM; we never had any Zoom calls,” Creese says. Despite those limitations, the group managed to arrange online watch-alongs, interviews with the cast and crew, and even, in a PR coup, hired a sand artist to draw a massive ‘Save Sanditon’ image on Bristol’s Brean beach, where the show was filmed.
One fan told the New York Times they had tweet goals of hitting 20,000 tweets a day as well as writing letters that translated into the production company Red Planet receiving “lorry-loads” of mail. There was also a change.org petition that hit 88,000 signatures.
ITV, in the end, capitulated. Sanditon is just about to stream its third season on ITVX, something the Sisterhood still can’t quite believe. “We were completely blown away,” Creese says.
Look at this amazing sand art 🏖️ 🎩 👒
— BBC Radio Somerset (@bbcsomerset) September 15, 2020
Artist Simon Beck has drawn two Jane Austen characters on the beach at Brean.
📻 Hear more about why campaign group #Sanditon Sisterhood commissioned him to do it https://t.co/keM4CDXdmy pic.twitter.com/NueX4OCeOh
But the stunts that the Sanditon team pulled are indicative of the increasing organisation and passion needed by fan groups to be noticed by network executives. Banish any thoughts of rattling off a few hours of letter writing on the weekends: this is a full-time commitment.
“We would work our day jobs [and] do stuff as much as we could throughout the day, maybe like on our lunch break, or if we had a slow moment,” Kelsey Richard, who worked on the Warrior Nun campaign, says. “Then a lot of it was at night; we’d be up until like, four o’clock in the morning, and then waking up at seven or eight, just to do it all again.”
As Richard and her colleague Sarah Blackburn explain, Warrior Nun’s legions of volunteers (comprising enthusiastic newbies and seasoned veterans who had worked on previous campaigns to save other shows, such as Vampire Academy) ordered themselves into data teams, social media whizzes, newsletter producers and designers, among others. Those who were lawyers advised fans on how to phrase their letters; Richard found herself googling the best way to wire money to Brazil, to buy billboard space on behalf of the campaigners there.
Their success is giving hope to the likes of the Lockwood & Co fans, who are barely two months into their fight. “We were like, ‘Okay, we have to do something about this,’” Janice R said when she found out the Netflix fantasy series, based on the popular book series by Jonathan Stroud, had been cancelled. “We knew that there had been successful show campaigns in the past. Within about two hours, I think, of the show being cancelled, a message [was] put out that spread… about a watch party that was happening. This was our initial plan.” Though not a direct way of campaigning, watch parties – watching TV episodes online with fellow fans – is a way of bringing the community together and showing support for the show in question.
In addition to watch parties, the team have been busy nominating Lockwood & Co for numerous awards, hosting a read-along of the books via Twitter and encouraging their fans to post weekly hashtags to keep the show trending on social media. They’ve also been checking in with other campaigns for support, mostly via the online social media website Discord, where fans can communicate with each other on dedicated channels. “There’s a channel for at least 10 different cancelled shows on there,” says Janice. “Warrior Nun was on there, that was recently saved; The Winchesters is on there. That’s a great place to communicate. We’ve been working on doing some collaborations with other servers [fan communities on Discord].”
Despite their enthusiasm, getting your show back on air is a mammoth task. Just ask those who adored Sally Wainwright’s BBC period drama Gentleman Jack, but who couldn’t save it (at least, not yet) from being cancelled – even after stunts such as staging a flashmob in Sibden Hall, where the show is set, and buying advertising space on a billboard in Times Square. Then there were those who loved the critically acclaimed Hannibal, starring Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen. Though the show was taken off air after three seasons due to low ratings, that didn’t stop its passionate fanbase from launching a petition calling for a season four and tweeting encouragement at its network NBC using the #saveHannibal hashtag.
Often, this failure is due to a lack of a unified message among the protesting fans – but sometimes, it’s simply bad luck. “I see Twitter campaigns, but I’m not sure how coordinated they are,” Creese says. “I think I noticed more at the time when we were campaigning for Sanditon, especially the Anne with an E campaign.”
That show, also on Netflix and adapted loosely from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, was cancelled after three seasons. A petition to save it broke records when it hit more than one million signatures. “I was quite sad for them because they were a huge campaign, and they clearly spent a lot of money on their stunts and things but unfortunately it didn’t pay dividends,” Creese continues. “So we do count ourselves incredibly lucky with what we achieved.”
“It’s definitely something I’ve seen more and more, on TikTok, on Twitter, on Instagram, just all over the place,” Janice R adds. “It’s kind of disheartening, because it’s really hard to commit to watching a show, especially as someone who doesn’t have a lot of free time, when I’m not sure if [there’s] a new season coming.”
If your hard work pays off and the show is renewed, don’t think the work is done: as Richard says, it’s all about maintaining the pressure on the networks and continuing to advocate for it.
“With Warrior Nun, we want to spread that awareness of [being] a community of people, [and] keeping them engaged,” she says. “We don’t know if it’s Netflix that picked it up, we don’t know what platform picked up Warrior Nun.
“So we want to keep that pressure on and say, ‘We’re not leaving, we’re not going away.’ You know, basically kind of urging them: this is a long-term engagement, which turns into a long-term investment. And we will follow you anywhere.”
In fact, since the show has been renewed, she’s had multiple people contact her to say that they’re giving Warrior Nun a go, safe in the knowledge that the story will be continued.
“It’s just shown me that if you make enough noise, people do actually listen,” Blackburn adds. “It’s not just screaming into a void. There are people on the other end. And, you know, depending on who you talk to, or how far your voice reaches, something can come from that. And I think that’s really powerful.”
