“Little Ellen” co-creator Jennifer Skelly found out that her show will be removed from HBO Max earlier this month by reading the news. In the past few days, I’ve watched dozens of other series meeting the chopping block while Warner Bros. Discovery cleans up the HBO streaming platform in order to reduce costs.
It wasn’t just the first two seasons of the animated show, which centered on young Ellen DeGeneres, kicked off HBO Max. In addition, 20 fully completed unreleased episodes – which includes the next two seasons – will not be released.
“It’s really devastating,” says Skelly. diverse. “I’ve worked on a million things that have never been seen before, but it’s very rare that you get this far—it’s literally been done—and you won’t see the light of day yet.”
Shortly before the release of Season 3, Episode 10 of “Little Ellen” in June 2022, Skelly was told that Warner Bros. Discovery was planning to keep it until 2023. The team didn’t discover both seasons until August. 3 and 4 will be shelved indefinitely.
Skelly continues, “In the livestream culture, I don’t know everything about how to go about this process. But to me, it’s like, ‘Okay, I got it.'” Just flip the switch. They are done and delivered. But there’s clearly a lot going on with companies in terms of what that means for them financially.”
One of the main reasons for this content is that Warner Bros. Discovery can reduce the remaining payments. But when content creators sign agreements with broadcasters, they don’t expect their shows to suddenly disappear. Physical versions are largely a thing of the past, and the creators don’t own the rights to distribute their work, which means the only way for people to watch many of the recently suspended series is to illegally pirate them. As a result of Warner Bros.’s decision. Discovery that certain shows aren’t worth keeping on HBO Max, these shows basically no longer exist.
“There were writers who had their first episodes in that 20th time, and there were directors who got their first directing opportunity,” says Skelly. “We had a lot of first things on our cast, and they wouldn’t be able to watch those episodes on TV and see their credit. It’s really hard.”
When asked if she thinks the creators would be concerned about moving forward with Warner Bros. Contract to protect themselves, because the standards in a year and a half will be different again. “
Throughout her career, “Little Ellen” has faced turmoil not only from the Warner Bros. merger. Discovery but also from the fall of DeGeneres, the theme of the series itself.
“We’ve been a complete storm for a lot of things, because the Eileen brand has also struggled in the past few years,” says Skelly. “Our show isn’t going to get a lot of love anyway for that. We started at the height of her career, but by the time she became animators — because it takes so long to get something done in animation — her brand was in a really different place, and her show was finish “.
In 2020, the DeGeneres talk show became the subject of an internal WarnerMedia investigation after numerous accounts of workplace problems in the daytime long series, including sexual misconduct, racism, intimidation and treatment of long-term employees during the COVID-19 shutdown. DeGeneres fired three of the show’s top producers and apologized on air for reports of abuse on her show. In 2021, DeGeneres announced that the show would end after its 19th season in 2022.
“This was another thing that was completely out of our control,” Skelly says. “There was a lot of turmoil around the Eileen brand just as we started moving into animation, and I thought they were going to end up deciding not to go ahead with the show. But they said, ‘No, we’re moving on,’ which was pretty cool. We were We are still able to create some beautiful works.”
Regarding Skelly’s own experience working with DeGeneres, “her interaction with her was less than 0%,” says co-author of “Little Ellen.”
“I met her once, very briefly, but it all went through Warner Bros. There wasn’t much interaction with her company at all, certainly not directly with her. We were really doing our own things in our own world, and that was cool” .
With more shows disappearing from HBO Max, Skelly can’t help but notice that the animated series appear to be a disproportionate success.
“When the pandemic hit, we were working on our first episode. We hadn’t been sharing animations yet, and we took our computers home on Friday and met on Zoom on Monday morning. We didn’t miss a moment,” Skelly said. “Animation has kept the industry going during the pandemic, and it’s taken a heavy hit between Netflix and Discovery right now. It feels like an extra kick in the teeth on top of all of that.”
She continues, “We were the ones who kept working when no one could show up on set, and COVID protocols were stopping people from filming. But we’re still creating content for you. Now that we’ve done that, and the pandemic is slowing, it feels like it’s being kicked to the limit. .which is a source of great frustration among the animation community at the moment.”
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