Turns Out Summer Isn't Over

 

In April of 2021 I fell head over heels with Freeform's new series Cruel Summer. A brilliantly told story of two teenage girls in a small Texas town told over three summers in the mid-1990s it was the great find of me during the  period when television was slumbering back to normality after Covid restrictions began to end.

Few critics were bigger boosters of it than me online. I would name it the best show of 2021 and argue that this series along with The Gilded Age and Yellowjackets representing what I believed the next phase in the Golden Age of TV. What was then known as the Hollywood  Critics Association (now the Astras) would give its initial awards for television that summer and one of the major reasons it instantly gained legitimacy in my eyes was that among the nominees for Best Cable Drama, along with Pose, Lovecraft Country and Yellowstone. I was also over the moon to see its co-leads Chiara Aurelia and Olivia Holt both nominated for Best Actress in a network or drama along with later Emmy nominees MJ Rodriguez, Mandy Moore and Jurnee Smollett. Not a million years did I believe it had a chance of winning in the top prize. So I'm pretty sure both my feet left the floor and my shout of joy could be heard from space when it actually won.

When the show was renewed for a second season I was disappointed – though not entirely surprised -that Freeform chose to go to an anthology format for the next season. Much as I believed there was more of a story to be told I thought it could move on just as easily if it was in a new format and a new cast of characters. The second season was miraculously completed before the work stoppage of 2023 in Hollywood and was one of the television shows that got me through that summer.

The series took place in a small town in Seattle, this time over three different time periods over the end of the 20^th century and the start of 2000. Generally it was not as well received as the first season but my respect for it didn't dim; I ended up ranking it only below Yellowjackets on my top ten list of 2023. In both cases I was in awe not only of the atmosphere that the showrunners managed to do to make it clear to viewers that one was in a different time period not just with the haircuts and clothing of the characters but also the lighting and cinematography. Both seasons did an exceptional job of recapturing what it was like to grow up in the 1990s (something that having done so I gave full points for accuracy) and deserved points for dealing with issues far more complicated than the average teenage fare. The first season dealt with the subject of grooming as well as same sex relationships (something that back then were far more frowned upon then today.) The latter dealt with the world of hacking, toxic masculinity among teenagers and how parental neglect can lead young people to do horrible things. All of them featured exceptional performances from young performers, mostly actresses who I predicted would achieve stardom. This was true for Aurelia and Holy as well as such lesser performers as Harley Quinn Smith in the first season and in the second, Lexi Underwood and Griffin Gluck already had to an extent.

So when the series was cancelled in December of 2023 you would think I would have been utterly devastated. I won't deny it hurt but I was already aware of the way so many cable channels were beginning to cut down on original programming in order to cut costs, something I assumed (correctly) was accelerated by the strike. It wasn't just Cruel Summer that was cancelled, it was pretty much all the original series Freeform had on the air, including long-time hit Good Trouble.

There's also the sad reality that very early in my experience as a viewer I had gotten used to the fact that many of the shows I loved were not going to survive their first season and that all success on television was a numbers game. It took a lot to accept this when it happened on cable (I think the cancellation of Showtime's Brotherhood in 2007 was the first time I accepted this as reality) but by this point I accepted it as a fact of life, if not a pleasant one.

I was also not naïve enough to believe it would be picked up by another cable service or streaming, something that has become more frequent in the last few years in particular. Part of that was because by this point even series that had been saved were starting to be killed before they could air a second season and some shows that were given two seasons guarantees (the Starz version of Dangerous Liaisons was one example at the time) were being canceled after one. I mourned its loss and then moved on, never thinking it was reappear on my radar.

Which is why when I made my daily sojourn to imdb.com last night my jaw almost immediately hit the floor and I had to blink several times to make sure I was seeing correctly. Even after I clicked the story I hardly dared believe it.

Yet there it was. Freeform in collaboration with Hulu has announced that a third season of Cruel Summer has been greenlit, a twist worthy of the show itself. And based on reports from Variety it seems very much like we are getting back to basics.

Jessica Biel and Michelle Purple, who served as the executive producers of Season 1 but departed when the show was renewed are back for a second go-round. And in what may almost certainly be the biggest guarantee of fans returning Olivia Holt has signed on as an executive producer – and will reprise her role as Kate Wallis. This would seem to imply that the third season will be a sequel to the first.

I won't deny that if this is the case I would be overjoyed. As I wrote in my original review of the first season there were a lot of open questions at the end of the first season that deserved to be followed up on. And few would deny the desire to see the original cast, least of all me.

Aurelia would be available, considering her most recent TV series Teacup has just been cancelled. It remains unclear as of yet if the rest of the cast, most notably Sarah Drew who played Jeanette Turner's mother in the first season will be. But this is the era where availability is not a big deal as it used to be: Alison Janney is now a regular on two series simultaneously, Jon Hamm was nominated for Emmys for work in two different series last year and Nicole Kidman was in at least five different shows over the last year alone and is currently working on the third season of Big Little Lies.

All of this, of course, is still in the hypothetical stage and I acknowledge it may take years to happen. And some of these projects do die on the vine as I'm more than aware of. But Hulu did get to the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers after a nearly four year hiatus.

For now I'm content with even the possibility of a third season. And even if it doesn't have the power and majesty of the first breakthrough season or the quiet intensity of the second, well, at least I can content myself with the fact that for once the gods of television who are almost always cruel with who they kill have been merciful for once. That's something to be thankful for as this summer comes to a close.