Like most of us, you’ve probably lost count of how many titles have been axed from the HBO Max catalog. Earlier this week alone, over 30 titles met a bitter end, and among them is animated series Little Ellen. Understandably, the series’ co-creator Jennifer Skelly wasn’t happy at all with the decision, and she spoke to Variety about it in an exclusive interview.
What’s most shocking about Skelly’s interview is the revelation that the next 20 episodes of Little Ellen – the equivalent of two seasons – were already done and ready for exhibition, but the streaming platform decided to shelve them anyway. The co-creator said she felt especially sorry for writers and directors who were going to make their TV debut with future episodes from the series, and now won’t get to take credit for their work:
“It’s really devastating. I’ve worked on a million things that have never seen the light of day, but it’s pretty rare that you get this far down the pipe — it’s literally done — and it’s still not going to see the light of day. […] In the streaming culture, I don’t know everything about how that process is done. But to me, it seems like, ‘Well you’ve got them. Just flip a switch. They’re done and they’re delivered.’ But obviously there’s so much corporate stuff going on in terms of what that means for them financially. […] There were writers who had their first episodes in that back 20, and there were directors who got their first shot at directing. We had a lot of firsts on our crew, and they won’t get to see those episodes on TV and see their credit. It’s really tough.”
In case you didn’t make the association, Little Ellen is a fictional account of Ellen Degeneres' childhood. The timing may not be quite right for a show centered on the former TV host, but Skelly says that they started working on the series way before the toxic workplace allegations came out regarding The Ellen Degeneres Show production. Skelly is aware that the “show wasn’t going to be getting a ton of love anyway”, but Warner Bros. decided to keep moving. She emphasizes that the animated series does its own thing, since Ellen’s involvement was practically non-existent.
“[I]nteraction with her was like less than 0%. […] I met her once, very briefly, but everything went through Warner Bros. There wasn’t very much interaction with her company at all, and certainly not with her directly. We were really doing our own thing in our own world, which was great.”
Little Ellen joins a sad slate of shelved or removed productions that new HBO Discovery CEO David Zaslav is choosing not to move forward with as the two streaming platforms merge. This “purge” seems to be hitting animated programs the hardest: Just this past week, the streamer removed or canceled titles like Summer Camp Island, Infinity Train, Driftwood, and Batman: The Caped Crusader.
Skelly also talked about animation creators, and underscored the fact that they were the only entertainment segment that kept moving in spite of COVID-19. And now that the pandemic is slowing down, and live-action productions came back to production at full speed, the animations are being kicked to the curb: “It feels like an extra kick in the teeth on top of all of it.”
Little Ellen was removed along with more than 30 titles from the HBO Max catalog. You can check out the full slate of axed programs in this article.
Check out the trailer for Little Ellen below: