Netflix has commissioned and will run a third season of the Tina Fey-produced comedy Girls5eva following Peacock's decision to cancel the critically lauded series after just two season.
The first two episodes of the Universal Studios-produced series, which has impressive aggregated approval by critics of 96%, will continue to run on Peacock but will also stream on Netflix, as well.
Peacock cancelled Girls5eva after the eighth and final season 2 episode dropped on June 9, making reportedly a tough decision on a show that brought prestige, but wasn't delivering the kind of audience numbers that lesser acclaimed original Peacock series like Bel Air were.
On Thursday, Peacock grandparent Comcast reported that its NBCUniversal media unit took at $604 million EBITDA loss on the streaming service in the third quarter. Tough decisions come with that kind of red ink.
Also read: How NBCU Badly Misplayed Its Hand with 'Manifest'
From Cobra Kai to Lucifer, Netflix has a history of using its massive platform of more than 223 million paid members to take shows that were modest successes on other platforms and turn them into global hits.
In the case of NBCU and Peacock, perhaps the most notable example is fantasy/sci-fi show Manifest, which blew up on Netflix in May 2021 just as NBC announced it wouldn't return to its primetime schedule for the coming fall.
After streaming hundreds of millions of hours of seasons 1-3 of Manifest, Netflix is getting read to queue up a fourth and final season on Nov. 4. Would Manifest have succeeded wildly on Peacock, which has only 15 million paid users? Probably not as wildly, but we'll never know.
As for Girls5eva, it's created by Meredith Scardino, and executive produced by Fey, Robert Carlock and Jeff Richmond -- who had all previously teamed up to produce The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for Netflix.
Girls5e3va stars Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Busy Philipps and Paula Pell as the surviving members of a one-hit-wonder girl group from the 1990s, now-middle-aged and not so fulfilled, who decide to get the band back together. ■
