Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist saved by Roku: Canceled series near deal for wrap-up movie
The show's not over yet for Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist! And it's all thanks to ... Roku?
Yeah, you read that right — EW has learned the canceled NBC musical series is currently in advanced negotiations with the streaming player to get a two-hour wrap-up movie that would premiere on The Roku Channel around the holidays. The full cast, including Jane Levy and Skylar Astin, are expected to return but new deals with the stars are currently being finalized.
And while Deadline reports that if the movie does well "it could lead to another season of the show," we hear it's too early to speculate about a series renewal at this time. This film deal is the result of Lionsgate TV — which produces Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist — mounting a large campaign to save the series in any form.
Sergei Bachlakov/NBC
Back in June, NBC canceled the series after two seasons. And while there were conversations with NBCUniversal about potentially moving the series to Peacock, a deal couldn't be reached so Lionsgate TV continued shopping the series elsewhere, eventually landing at Roku. Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist creator Austin Winsberg also kept up the fight with the social media campaign #saveZoeysPlaylist to "make some noise."
And now thanks to Roku, Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist fans will finally get some kind of resolution to the season 2 finale game-changing cliffhanger that revealed fan-favorite couple Zoey (Levy) and Max (Astin) finally got back together, only for Max to realize he somehow now has Zoey's powers of hearing other people's inner thoughts and desires through songs.
"We've been setting the stage for this for a long time," Winsberg previously told EW. "We've talked about Max getting the powers in the writers room pretty early on in season 1 as something that we would want to do in the future. When you look at superhero shows and superhero origin stories, it seems like there's always a period or a moment in time where the hero discovers that somebody else also has the powers, and when we're talking about the evolution of the show and how does this show continue, giving the powers to somebody else felt like a natural evolution... I think you can infer from that that he is being given this power for a reason, to create a version of equity or equality in their relationship."
As for what that meant for a third season/this new holiday movie, Winsberg previously said, "It just opens up the possibilities for what can happen next, especially in terms of the relationship between Zoey and Max and the complications of that. By giving Max his own insight into Zoey's world, maybe the way that he views musical numbers and maybe his takeaway from those musical numbers could be different than hers, or maybe by him getting the powers he can then help Zoey with her emotional procedural stories in different ways. There could be a fun role reversal for her too because she's always been the one who's had to figure it out so it's kind of nice to have her be the one who maybe has a deeper insight now."
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