Count Firefly Lane as one of those high-initial-impact shows that Netflix doesn’t end up canceling before a second season.
It certainly seemed touch-and-go there for a while.
The flashback-laden series, based on Kristin Hannah's best-selling eponymous novel, developed for TV and executive produced by show runner Maggie Friedman (Eastwick, Spellbound), and starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke as very different lifelong friends, will get a second round of 10 episodes, debuting in 2022.
Firefly Lane debuted on Netflix on Feb. 3 and garnered more than 1.3 billion minutes of U.S. streaming, according to Nielsen measurements for the week of Feb. 1-7. That was more than any other show on the four biggest U.S. subscription streaming services—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Disney Plus.
And it had some staying power--the show's first 10 episodes, posted all at once, garnered just under 1.3 billion streaming minutes for the week of Feb. 8-14, ranking it No. 1 that week, too.
No major U.S. SVOD show has exceeded 1 billion streaming minutes in a week since.
It stayed in Nielsen's top 10 overall rankings until Netflix's similarly targeted Ginny & Georgia debuted at No. 1 on Feb. 24.
Conspicuously, Ginny & Georgia had a first-week minutes total of under 1 billion, but it received a season 2 nod back in mid-April.
Of course, the respective economic models of the two series might have impacted the timing of Netflix's decision-making. While Ginny & Georgia features a cast of largely journey-men and women TV actors, the Firefly Lane adaptation is on the hook to extend the established Chalk, not to mention film star Heigl.
