Nothing to sing about! NBC announced the cancelation of musical comedy-drama Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist on Wednesday, June 9, and it didn’t take long for the Twitter uproar to begin.
The series, which was on the bubble for months, took home the Emmy award in 2020 for Outstanding Choreography For Scripted Programming and was the only network show to garner a Golden Globe nomination in 2021, with star Jane Levy landing the Best Actress – Television Series, Musical or Comedy nod.
“Okay. Here we are. The news is out. NBC/Peacock have decided not to go forward with another season. We can discuss that later. But right now I refuse to believe the show is dead. There is too much love and goodwill and the fan base is incredible. Now here is what I need,” the show’s creator, Austin Winsberg, tweeted on Wednesday before asking fans and the show’s cast to tweet their support of the series.
For Winsberg, it’s much more than a TV show. The series follows Zoey (Levy) as she discovers she can hear other’s thoughts through song. During the first season, this was extremely helpful because she couldn’t communicate with her father (played by Peter Gallagher) after he was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), leaving him unable to move or speak.
“It started from the fact that my father passed away several years ago from PSP, this degenerative neurological disease,” Winsberg told Entertainment Weekly when the series began. “In a year, my dad went from being this super dynamic, vibrant, outgoing guy to pretty close to a vegetable. He couldn’t move; he could only kind of move his right hand. He was losing weight rapidly. He couldn’t speak anymore. For the last six months that my dad was alive, we didn’t really know how much he was processing, if he was processing what was really going on, in his brain.”
He noted that after losing his father, he began wondering “What was really going on in my dad’s head during that time that he was sick?” and eventually, turned it into an optimistic, hopeful series.
Gallagher, 65, also closely related to the series. “My dad was one of the generation World War 2, Battle of the Bulge, Normandy Invasion and all those things. He wasn’t a big talker ever. And I, to this day, every day of my life, I feel like I failed that I couldn’t get him to talk to me,” the O.C. alum told Us Weekly exclusively in 2020. “I had all these questions and he’d say, ‘Ah Gallagher, you’ll figure it out. Go clean the gutters.’ It was a different generation. So, I understand that longing and I also understand how important it is.”
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Scroll through the gallery below for the cast’s reactions to the cancelation:
