Meta is pulling the plug on its Facebook Watch originals, including Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk series, which is one of the platform’s breakout hits.
In a move that comes amid the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company’s cost-cutting initiative, Pinkett’s popular chat show will come to an abrupt end after five seasons.
Other shows affected by this entire Facebook Watch originals shutdown include Steve Harvey’s Steve on Watch – a revival of his former NBC daytime show that was cancelled in 2015 – and various docuseries hosted by JoJo Siwa, Yara Shahidi and Becky G.
A Meta representative confirmed the news to Variety. The Independent has contacted Meta for comment.
The major cutback coincides with Meta’s layoff of 10,000 roles company-wide. This follows the 11,000 staffers who were made redundant at the end of 2022.
When the social media platform launched Facebook Originals in August 2017, its content consisted of a variety of scripted and unscripted series.
However, in recent years, its content transitioned entirely to unscripted options.
Red Table Talk premiered in May 2018 and has garnered over 11 million followers, along with its corresponding discussion group of 600,000 members.
Hosted by Smith, her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and her daughter Willow, the three often discussed a mixture of personal, professional and sometimes sensitive topics.
They were often joined by other celebrity guests, such as Jennette McCurdy, Ireland Baldwin and Smith’s husband Will.
The Men in Black star was a frequent guest on the show, with some of his episodes making headlines and spurring wider backlash against him and his family – in a 2019 episode, he spoke with Smith about her “entanglement” with singer August Alsina.
During Will’s latest appearance, he horrified his children after bringing out real-life slavery devices while discussing his newest movie Emancipation.
