Filmmaker Gregg Araki confirmed Now Apocalypse Season 2 was fully written long before the network pulled the plug. The 2019 comedy series ran for a single ten-episode stretch on Starz. It left a cult audience desperate for a resolution. But the strangest twist didn’t happen on screen—it happened in the boardroom.
Araki discussed the death of the project while promoting his upcoming release, I Want Your Sex. Starz had already financed the pre-production phase of the sci-fi series, and management made sure “the cast was paid” for the second season. He stated the scripts were “actually written.” The creative team wasn’t just planning—they were actively prepping the shoot.
And the unfilmed narrative contained a weird coincidence.
A storyline involving the character Carly, played by Kelli Berglund, directly mirrored the show’s actual cancellation, according to a widely circulated Reddit discussion today. Carly’s development executive gets fired in episode nine of the unproduced season. The firing throws her entire project into turnaround. Araki called the script “prophetic” because it predicted the exact corporate restructuring they were about to go through.
“Literally, our executive got fired, and the whole network changed,” Araki stated. He added that the fictional disaster was “literally what happened to us.”
The original run featured an ensemble cast—including Avan Jogia, Beau Mirchoff, and Roxane Mesquida—backed by prominent executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Gregory Jacobs. The plot followed young Los Angeles millennials as they dealt with chaotic relationships. Meanwhile, the main character experienced marijuana-fueled visions of an alien invasion. Starz officially canceled the experiment on July 26, 2019. Former Starz COO Jeffrey Hirsch praised the effort at the time, but he declined to order another installment.
So the completed scripts simply sat on a hard drive.
Araki previously hinted at the frustrating truth during a September 2023 conversation, as noted in a Pride.com retrospective about the series. He expressed mild hope back then that the Hollywood writers’ strike might force networks to greenlight already-written material. Networks never attempted the desperate scheduling maneuver.
The Sunk Cost of Starz Leadership Shakeups
Massive waste becomes obvious when networks pay a cast for a season that never films. New leadership routinely kills off projects greenlit by their predecessors to clear the books for their own programming slate. Executives simply ignore the sunk costs already committed to a production.
Araki’s situation demonstrates how aggressively new management will write off lost expenses. Starz absorbed the financial hit of commissioning an entire season and paying out actor contracts. They swallowed the loss just to avoid airing a show associated with a fired executive. Corporate politics consistently override financial logic. Creators and audiences are stuck with a script they can never finish.