Julie Vrabelova/Prime Video
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Amazon Prime Video's "Carnival Row" only ran for two seasons, with the first premiering in 2019 and the second and final season coming out in 2023. What led to it joining the ranks of fantasy shows that were canceled too soon? It had everything to do with what happened in between those two dates: According to the showrunner, they made the call to end the series during the COVID-19 pandemic to free the cast and crew from their contracts.
"Carnival Row" stars Orlando Bloom as a police inspector and Cara Delevingne as one of the many fae beings who live in an oppressive, steampunk-esque city. Production on the sophomore season began in late 2019 only for the pandemic to force Hollywood to come to a screeching halt. Erik Oleson, who took over as showrunner for Season 2 after series creator Travis Beacham departed, told Screen Rant that the pandemic made him, Prime Video, and the production company Legendary come to the same conclusion as delays went on.
"There were a lot of people under contract that would have been unable to go get other jobs and feed their families and it was the right moral decision for the cast and crew to let them go get work rather than hold them to contracts and tie them up," Oleson explained. The last season of "Carnival Row" premiered in February 2023 and the finale aired the following month.
Amazon gave the showrunner two extra episodes to wrap up the story
"Carnival Row" coming to an end after two seasons was a blow for fans, but the fact that the decision was taken before Season 2 came out meant that showrunner Erik Oleson and the writers were able to retool the various storylines in a way that wrapped them up without fully closing the door on any future seasons, just in case. "We needed to go reinvent some of the storylines that we had already shot, so we went back and did heavy rewriting on some of the early episodes," Oleson said.
According to the showrunner, his bosses at Amazon were great about the whole thing, even gifting him a couple of extra episodes when he told them that he wasn't sure he could end things in a satisfactory way in just eight episodes. One storyline that needed wrapping up was eerily relevant. As Orlando Bloom told Screen Rant in a sperate interview, "We were shut down for COVID just as we were finishing filming a storyline that involved a virus going through the Carnival Row taking out the fae."
Sadly, despite everyone's best efforts, the second season of "Carnival Row" felt disjointed. On Rotten Tomatoes, the Critics Consensus for Season 2 reads: "Even more uneven than before, Carnival Row's second season doesn't lack for ambition, but its endless sprawl of subplots mostly dovetail into a storytelling dead end." The sophomore season earned a telling 41% critic score on the website, though audience reviews were kinder, leading to a popcornmeter score of 70%.
