TheQuartering [8/5/2022]
On Tuesday, Netflix put a stake in First Kill after just one season. Today, showrunner Felicia D. Henderson went public with her thoughts about why the show was not given a new cycle.
First Kill was based on a short story by Victoria “V. E.” Schwab and executive produced by Emma Roberts.
“I so enthusiastically signed on to this show [because] it has something for everyone,” Henderson said in an interview today with the Daily Beast, “strong women leads, supernatural intrigue, an epic, Shakespearean battle between warring families, and a prominently featured Black family in the genre space, something Black viewers crave and a general audience needs to be treated to.”
But, she said, while the marketing materials for the show were compelling, they were a bit reductive.
“The art for the initial marketing was beautiful. I think I expected that to be the beginning and that the other equally compelling and important elements of the show — monsters vs. monster hunters, the battle between two powerful matriarchs, etc. — would eventually be promoted, and that didn’t happen.” See a poster for the show below.
Released June 10, First Kill made the streamer’s weekly Top 10 for English-language TV series in its first three days. It ranked No. 7 with 30.3M hours viewed. It peaked at No. 3 in its first full week of release with 48.8M hours viewed, trailing only Stranger Things Season 4 and Peaky Blinders Season 6. The series easily cleared 100M hours viewed in its first 4 weeks on the service.