After seven years, Gregg Araki recently explained the case of art imitating life that ended his and Karley Sciortino‘s Now Apocalypse.
While discussing their new movie I Want Your Sex, premiering Friday, July 31 in theaters, Araki revealed to Deadline that Season 2 of the 2019 erotic sci-fi series was “actually written,” and “the cast was paid” to return, but a change in leadership halted their plans.
When I tell the New Queer Cinema filmmaker that I was hoping for a sophomore season, he assured me I’m “not the only one,” adding, “The second season is actually written. We wrote the second season, the cast was paid for the second season, we were prepping the second season.”
Araki continued, “And it’s funny because in the second season of Now Apocalypse, the character Carly [played by Kelli Berglund], she gets paid to do a TV show, or develop a show, and so she has a development executive or something. Her whole storyline is working on the show, and then in episode 9, her executive gets fired, and her show gets put in a turnaround, and that’s literally what happened to us. Literally, our executive got fired, and the whole network changed and the mandate changes—it was so prophetic.”
Co-written by Araki and Vogue.com sex columnist Sciortino, Now Apocalypse followed disillusioned Angeleno, Ulysses (Avan Jogia) and his friends as they navigated love, sex and fame in LA, all while he is plagued with premonitions about the end of the world. All episodes were directed by Araki.
The 10-episode Season 1 ran from March to May, 2019, made with executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Gregory Jacobs under Soderbergh’s deal at Starz. The network canceled the show after one season that July. Starz COO Jeff Hirsch called it “a great show” and “a great experiment for us” at the time.
