Rose Matafeo’s ‘Starstruck’ Renewed for Season 3 at HBO Max
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Starstruck fans, you can exhale now.
HBO Max and BBC Three have renewed their award-winning comedy and critical darling from creator and star Rose Matafeo for a third season. The news comes some four months since the series returned with its second season on the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed streamer.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
“A third? Sure. Fine. I’m truly thrilled to bring this incredibly talented cast back for a third installment, and equally excited to clamber into the director’s seat alongside my nice friend Alice Snedden, who I cannot seem to get rid of,” said Matafeo, who co-writes the series alongside fellow director Snedden and Nic Sampson.
The comedy, about a millennial in East London who becomes romantically involved with a famous film star (played by Nikesh Patel), currently has an impressive 96 percent rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 77 percent score from viewers. Minnie Driver and Russell Tovey co-star in the under-the-radar comedy. THR’s chief TV critic Daniel Fienberg described Starstruck season two in his review as “Consistently fizzy charm elevated by Matafeo’s irrepressible energy.”
In a March interview with THR podcast TV’s Top 5, Matafeo opened up about embracing Starstruck’s status as a rom-com and her approach to the show’s future. “We always treated each [season] as a thing into its own. The first series … what a perfect ending! It doesn’t need a single thing beyond that — and then we made a second [season]. We had the same approach for season two,” she said. “We always wanted to do something that would feel satisfying to someone even watching the second season without watching the first. … I do think we’ve tried to put work into creating a world people want to return to … and hopefully it’s a world that feels warm and you want to be in company of those characters again. That’s the door that is left open.”
The Starstruck renewal arrives at a time when HBO Max parent Warner Bros. Discovery is increasingly budget conscious as CEO David Zaslav has been tasked with trimming $3 billion from the newly merged company’s budget. After the deal closed, Zaslav pulled the plug on streamer CNN+ and, most recently, passed on J.J. Abrams drama Demimonde amid a dispute over the show’s sizable budget. To that end, HBO Max recently canceled Made for Love and Raised by Wolves. Both shows, originally greenlit under the streamer’s former executive regime, ran for two seasons.
“Rose has created a show that strikes just the right balance of heart and humor,” HBO Max head of originals Sarah Aubrey said in a statement announcing the news Monday. “Starstruck is exactly the kind of rom-com that we love at HBO Max, and we are so happy to see Jessie and Tom’s story continue.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
