HBO Max Just Canceled One of Its Best Original Shows Amid Cancellation Bloodbath

HBO Max has canceled Love Life, a rom-com that was one of its earlier original shows and a staple of its scripted programming. The show was an anthology-style series that starred Anna Kendrick in Season 1 and William Jackson Harper in Season 2. According to a report by Variety, it will not be getting a Season 3.

Love Life was first ordered in May of 2019, before WarnerMedia’s new streaming service even had an official name. It was created by Sam Boyd, who was co-showrunner with Bridget Bedard and Rachelle Williams. Season 2 premiered in October of 2021, so hope for another installment has been growing slim for a while now. Still, official word of the cancellation seems to spell more bad news for HBO Max as its parent company enacts drastic cost-saving cancellations.

Love Life focused on a single character each season, jumping around in their timeline to depict various relationships that shaped them and their romantic tendencies. By the end of the season, viewers would be able to piece together their journey from first love to happily ever after, with a real understanding of how relationships and people change over time.

The show was generally well-received by critics and fans, even if it wasn’t the biggest viral sensation in HBO Max’s catalog. The show as a whole has 79 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 76 percent score submitted by users. However, this average brings together very disparate scores for the two seasons. Season 1 has a 63 percent score on the Tomatometer while Season 2 has 95 percent positive ratings. Some fans mourned the cancellation for this very reason, believing the show was just about to hit its stride and start connecting with a wider audience.

Unfortunately, Love Life may fall under the umbrella of other recent cancellations at HBO Max, which are attributed to high-level executive decisions being made at the newly merged parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. The company has been cutting HBO Max original content all year in an effort to end redundancies and cut costs, while also moving toward its plan of combining HBO Max with the streaming service Discovery+.

The aspect of this process that has social media the most upset is that some canceled shows are being removed from HBO Max altogether, and in some cases, there is nowhere else to watch them. Fortunately, that’s not true of Love Life. The show is still streaming on HBO Max at the time of this writing and there is no word of it being removed. However, it is also available to rent or purchase on digital stores including Prime Video, Apple TV and Vudu.