Flack star Anna Paquin took it in stride when she learned season two would not air on Pop TV. She said she’s been working long enough to have gone through this before.
“These things happen,” Paquin said. “The work you love sits on the shelf and does not get released. I’ve been around the roundabout enough times to really not take anything personally.”
Pop TV had stepped back from the originals business as the newly merged ViacomCBS shifted some network strategies. “Giant corporate mergers are not anything any of us can account for,” Paquin said.
She acknowledged that a show being canceled isn’t all that big a deal in a world where people are gravely suffering from COVID. “There are real, life-and-death circumstances happening in the world all around us,” she said. “We make entertainment, and it’s great and I love it and what’s what I do with my life. But it’s entertainment. If you didn’t have your priorities in check already, this puts a lot of things in perspective.”
Paquin added: “My show left one network for another. These are high-class problems.”
She mentioned being grateful for all Pop TV did for Flack, and is pumped to shift to Amazon. “Amazon has this obviously massive reach,” she said. “We have a whole first season a lot of people have not seen, and an entire second season literally ready to go.”
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Paquin mentioned how creator Oliver Lansley hooked her in with dazzling scripts. “The writing and the darkness and the humor and the combo of all that,” she said. “In the first seconds, it’s, ‘I think I know what’s happening’ and you don’t.”
She appreciates that Amazon Prime Video execs dig Flack. “They loved the show for all its raw, raunchy, complete inappropriateness,” Paquin said. “That is the version we are airing on Amazon.”
