Failure to Launch: A Defense of ‘My Lady Jane’

On June 27, Amazon Prime Video released the first season of “My Lady Jane,” a quirky, fantastical rewriting of the life story of Lady Jane Grey. Less than two months later, Amazon announced that it would not be renewing the show for a second season. So what happened?

The show was well-liked, receiving good reviews and garnering a small yet passionate fan base, and yet it didn’t receive the chance to fully shine before Amazon made the decision to cancel it. Ultimately, “My Lady Jane” has become the most recent victim of the unrealistically high viewership standards that production companies have adopted as a result of streaming service popularity and the culture of viral television that it has caused.

When Amazon decided to cancel “My Lady Jane,” it stated the reason as lack of a large enough audience. By this time in mid-September, the hashtag #myladyjane has garnered over 18,000 posts on Instagram and over 7,000 posts on TikTok, both of which are numbers that are growing by the day. It’s true that “My Lady Jane” has not had the immediate mass-viewership that hit shows like “Bridgerton” and “Outer Banks” were fortunate enough to have when they were first released. However, it has accumulated a significant fanbase of its own, one which is passionate enough to be making content and discussing it online.

It is incredibly rare for a show to have the mixture of baseline likability, good marketing, and fortunate timing which allows it to achieve the overnight sensation status that streaming services seem to view as the standard for success these days. To expect this level of success out of any show in order to warrant a season two is to set the show up for failure. “My Lady Jane” was canceled not because of a general lack of viewership, but rather because of its inability to reach an unattainable standard of popularity within its first two months.

What is most frustrating is that the inability of “My Lady Jane” to reach this unattainable standard of popularity had nothing to do with the show itself. Ultimately, the show was simply not marketed well. Due to its lack of strong marketing, perhaps the only way that consumers could discover “My Lady Jane” is through a handful of TikToks made by dedicated fans. If viewers have to stumble upon this show by pure chance as some sort of diamond in the rough, how could it have ever gained traction amongst the broader public? Clearly, “My Lady Jane” had an ineffective marketing strategy which minimized its chances of commercial success from the get go.

Additionally, despite relatively low viewership, the show is simply good and the reviews show it. And although all reviews are subjective and no rating can ever perfectly encompass everyone’s opinion of a piece of media or art, the overall 95% rating that “My Lady Jane” received from Rotten Tomatoes critics is definitely not something to be taken lightly. Moreover, “My Lady Jane” is a rare instance of such critical acclaim that its rating from critics is higher than that of the general audience, whose Rotten Tomatoes average — although still exceptional — lagged slightly behind with a score of 90%. To put it simply, if reviews were the deciding factor in whether or not a show was given the green light, the writers for “My Lady Jane” would probably be back to work already.

After all, numbers and reviews are only a couple factors in decisions about renewing television. Ultimately, the show should not receive a second season simply because it had high ratings or was referenced in a certain number of posts on Tiktok. Rather, “My Lady Jane” should have been given a second season because it is wacky, unique, exciting, and utterly joyful. Yes, it has a romantic hero that shapeshifts into a horse and all the humor that comes with satirizing England’s Tudor era. But that’s not what makes it special: “My Lady Jane” rewrites the story of a woman who had nothing but bad luck in her life. It allows a stubborn, spunky young woman to become queen, and — most importantly — it centralizes a female character who is valued and desired not for her beauty — which, admittedly she has — but for her intelligence. At the end of the day, its cancellation highlights the unfortunate way in which production companies and streaming services have come to value viewership — at an unrealistic standard — over quality. We can only hope that “My Lady Jane” will be the last show to fall victim to this warped standard of success.

—Staff writer Nell G. Cunningham can be reached at nell.cunningham@thecrimson.com.