Hulu has officially canceled the drama series Black Cake after just one season.
The series was based on the New York Times bestseller of the same name by Charmaine Wilkerson and was adapted Marissa Jo Cerar, who was showrunner. Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and Aaron Kaplan’s Kapital Entertainment produced the series.
The series starred Mia Isaac, Adrienne Warren, Chipo Chung, Ashley Thomas, Lashay Anderson, Faith Alabi and Glynn Turman, with Ahmed Eljah, Simon Wan and Sonita Henry appearing as recurring guest stars.
Deadline was the first to report the news, which comes down 10 months after season of the show ended. Black Cake followed the source material of its novel, so it is not entirely surprising that the story would wrap after one season. However, it seems as if there was set to be more life for the show.
The report from Deadline states that though the fate of the show had been “sealed for months,” Netflix was once potentially interested in picking it up.
Was Netflix going to pick up Black Cake?
“This marks a formal resolution for the series, from Women of the Movement creator Marissa Jo Cerar, Oprah Winfrey‘s Harpo Films and Aaron Kaplan‘s Kapital Entertainment, whose fate had been sealed for months,” Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva wrote. “It didn’t necessarily have to be — I’d heard chatter that Netflix was interested in picking up the acclaimed drama but the inquiry didn’t go far as program relocations from one major streamer to another are very rare — and complicated — in the era of streaming wars.”
As Deadline also notes, Netflix was actually interested in the project before it actually went to Hulu.
What was Black Cake about?
The official synopsis was as follows:
In the late 1960s, a runaway bride named Covey disappears into the surf off the coast of Jamaica and is feared drowned or a fugitive on the run for her husband’s murder. Fifty years later in California, a widow named Eleanor Bennett, loses her battle with cancer, leaving her two estranged children, Byron and Benny, a flash drive that holds previously untold stories of her journey from the Caribbean to America. These stories, narrated by Eleanor, shock her children and challenge everything they thought they knew about their family’s origin.
The entire first season is streaming on Hulu.