When information broke in December that Max (then HBO Max) had decided to effectively cancel Minx, a collective shudder went via Hollywood creatives. It wasn’t simply that Minx—a captivating, dick-filled comedy in regards to the launch of a Playgirl-style journal within the ’70s—was a critically successful show. It was that Minx had already obtained a second season order from the community and was, in truth, on the final week of capturing that season. Showrunners, writers, and casts had been left questioning, “If HBO could up and back out of a show it had already put so much money and confidence into, then who’s to say it couldn’t happen to us?”

What Max did with Minx is named “writing down,” and it’s changing into more and more widespread. Networks, seeking to minimize prices, can declare that an asset (on this case, a present) has depreciated extra quickly than anticipated. They “write down” the worth of the present on the books, making it price lower than it was initially, subsequently ending up with an total loss on their steadiness sheet and a large tax deduction. It works for current reveals and for beforehand commissioned work, therefore why so many Paramount and Disney originals have been disappearing from their streaming companies in current months. (In truth, Disney recently reported that it took $1.5 billion in write-offs this spring, which consultants have attributed to all that vanishing content material.)

Some Hollywood fits can be fast to remind creatives that it’s referred to as “show business,” not “show security,” and there are different causes networks write down content material, from making an attempt to keep away from licensing or residual funds to the money they get from shuffling content material over to a FAST (free, ad-supported streaming TV) service like Pluto TV or Tubi.

Still, none of that basically helped ease the ache when Minx showrunner Ellen Rapoport needed to inform her forged and crew in regards to the present’s potential cancellation. She’d heard about it a number of days earlier than from the present’s manufacturing firm, Lionsgate, who’d urged her to maintain it to herself. The firm had saved the information from her so long as it might and tried to place a optimistic spin on it, saying that HBO would pay to complete out the second season and couldn’t bar them from taking it elsewhere. But nonetheless, Rapoport says, it felt like “a shit sandwich inside of a croissant, like, ‘We love the show, you’re canceled, but you’re going to find a new home.’”

She saved the information to herself as she ready to direct the finale, the entire time questioning if that week was the final one she’d ever spend on a Minx set. She lastly obtained the go-ahead to inform the actors on a Friday, when Lionsgate began to sense that information would break within the trades the next week. “My biggest nightmare was that we’d be on set and an article would come out,” says Rapoport. She took the time that weekend to name the present’s six sequence regulars—Ophelia Lovibond, Jake Johnson, Lennon Parham, Oscar Montoya, Jessica Lowe, and Idara Victor—in addition to recurring visitors Rich Sommer and Elizabeth Perkins. “Everyone was surprised, because this had never even been in the ether,” Rapoport says. “We’d never even talked about it.”

In truth, Rapoport says, neither she nor anybody else concerned with the manufacturing of the present had ever actually gotten viewership numbers from Max. Those sorts of stats are held notoriously near the vest at streaming firms, which is irritating for actors and creators, who’re left just about at the hours of darkness in regards to the standing of their present (and, as actors currently striking will tell you, the standing of their paltry residuals). “They told us that we had a very high completion rate of about 90 percent, which was amazing, and they told us that our audience was evenly split between men and women,” Rapoport says. “That’s all they really said, other than that our viewership was on par with shows like Julia and Hacks.”

The week after Rapoport advised her actors, she obtained a name from Lionsgate telling her that the story was about to interrupt and that she needed to inform everybody else engaged on the present. “I tried to keep morale up,” she says. “It’s obviously very startling to think that the thing you’ve been working on for months and months and months could just be disappeared, and no one will ever see it, but I tried to make the point that HBO Max distributed us in North America and Latin America, but Lionsgate owns us and distributes us throughout the world.” She was assured Minx would discover one other distributor.

Rapoport says that when information broke that Minx was off Max, Lionsgate was having critical talks with about 4 completely different potential consumers. While she knew that the probabilities of it touchdown someplace else had been fairly stable, she wasn’t allowed to explicitly inform anybody engaged on the present. “I just tried to reassure them that I felt like it would be OK,” she explains.