One Season Wonders: Willow Did Everything Right and Got Cancelled Anyway

What are we doing here? I mean as artists, as appreciators of art, as “fans” or whatever? This is the unspoken question posed by every failed season of television, at its base. There’s a contract between producers and networks, industry and audience, that we are all watching TV. The cynical say it is to sell soap and plastic toys, the idealistic say it is to tell stories. When an endeavor like a season of television fails, it’s the failure of a whole system. The reasons for those failures, when a show is perfectly good, say something about that system: Fan culture getting too big for its britches, storytellers telling stories too honestly, or a premise too obtuse for the extremely handcrafted and labor-intensive nature of its chosen medium.

In most of these situations, it’s easy to blame the network or studio—the money men. Why can’t they take more risks? Why must they approve the lowest common denominator, the safest pablum? I share that sentiment, too, but also, I get it. Every minute of television is insanely expensive to produce, and if you want to get people out of their comfort zones, you need to break the bank: I can’t count the number of people who would never even look at a sword or a fantasy map who got drawn in by Game of Thrones and then ranted at me that I needed to see it because they had just discovered the possibility of dragons and magic being in a story it is okay to talk about at work!! But that took Game of Thrones-level money and production value.

This brings me to Willow, and that same question: What are we doing here? Because Willow is a show that exists (existed…) solely by fiat of the money men. Disney acquired Lucasfilm and started stripmining it for franchise possibilities. And because banking on the nostalgia of millennials is mostly what Lucasfilm properties are good for, they waved a wand made of money and turned a perfectly sweet little standalone film into the foundation of a three-season epic fantasy show. They got Warwick Davis back! He’s great!

Then they just yanked it from Disney Plus after less than six months, ostensibly for cost-cutting measures, but probably also (I’m just going to say it because I’m writing this article this week) because the chief romance in the show is between a pair of sword lesbians.

One Season Wonders is about failure—about bravely rolling the dice on an out-there story and hoping it’ll be a hit, which contrary to Hollywood money men, nobody can ever know for sure going into a project. But I decided on Willow to close out this year’s look back at these singular shows because we’ve entered a period now where it seems that neither the premise of shows, nor their performance, are ever clearly the reason for these unfortunate failures. Shows are now summoned into being by the board room and then just as quickly and inexplicably erased by the board room. It does not exactly encourage one to want to get attached to any particular thing these guys insist we watch next.

The Show

There are a lot of words you need if you want to exhaustively detail Willow’s copious backstory, necessary chiefly because the source material was straightforward and didn’t need any continuation. The original film was a riff on the fantasy of Tolkien: An unlikely underdog hero from a pastoral idyll is suddenly saddled with a Hero’s Journey, he meets some unlikely allies and he discovers a strength within himself as he soldiers on in the fight against evil. You’ll be watching a perfectly fun ‘80s fantasy epic and then bam, out comes a creature designed by Phil Tippet that will haunt your dreams for decades to come.

The show goes in a completely different tonal and stylistic direction, and bafflingly so. It’s a late-2010s YA romantasy, a School for Good and Evil or Shadow and Bone or the like. It’s not bad, it just isn’t Willow at all. This is a story with magic systems and power levels and spell slots, with invincibility armor and beam struggles. A wizard’s duel is never supposed to be about POWER!!!! so much as it’s supposed to be about cunning or morality, or just wisdom. Disney oughta know: When Madame Mim turned into a dragon in The Sword in the Stone, Merlin laid her out by transforming into bacteria. Just like Willow defeated a mad sorceress tyrant by using the same vanishing pig trick that failed to impress his friends and neighbors. The power-hungry have blind spots! This is a universal truth!

In place of this, the show has sword lesbians, which I’m always in favor of, so much so that I want them to have better shows to be fans of. Princess Kit (Ruby Cruz) and aspiring knight Jade (Erin Kellyman, continuing her streak of being mistreated in Every. Single. Disney. Production.) are sweethearts, but Kit has an obligation to marry the feckless Prince Graydon (Tony Revolori). Kit’s brother, Prince Airk (Dempsey Bryk and his chest), meanwhile, is a no-account playboy who is seeing a young scullery maid (Ellie Bamber) on the sly. Between them all are a web of simmering resentments: Airk hates that everybody trusts Kit with Doing Stuff and not him, Kit resents that she’s being made to marry Graydon on the same day Jade is getting promoted to a new posting, Graydon just wants to be adequate for once in his life. All that takes a more prominent place in the narrative than the backstory, which is that this is all taking place in the very kingdom saved by Willow and the destined child he saved in the original film. And that this peace, ruled over by Queen Sorsha (Joanne Whalley, one of the only two actors reprising her role from the film), is hanging by a thread as a new darkness rises.

That darkness strikes out of nowhere in the first act, as a bunch of nasties lurch out of the shadows and capture Airk. Kit’s mother sends her and a motley crew of adventurers out to find her old friend Willow, now reputedly the Baddest Wizard Ever, to go rescue Airk and stop the bad guys from finding the child Willow saved all those years ago, the girl Elora (who, as it turns out, is Ellie Bamber’s maid character, her importance having been hidden from her). Venturing out beyond the borders of their kingdom, they find Willow (Davis, back in the saddle and honestly the best part of the whole endeavor), discover Elora’s true identity, and mount an expedition beyond the edges of the known world to thwart evil and rescue Airk. Over the course of the show, the characters learn more spells and get sick weapons and abilities. Sometimes they make out with each other in between doing these things!

I’m trying not to be cynical about the story itself, I’m just not sure why it even had to be called “Willow.” Davis deserves to be a wise old wizard anyhow! In eight 45-minute episodes, it’s not a bad story, even if it has problems it just cannot overcome. There’s a scene a good way into the show where Elora, separated from the rest of the group, encounters a pair of charming ladies (Hannah Waddingham and Caoimhe Farren) all dressed in flannel, living in a little cabin paradise in the midst of an otherwise extremely haunted forest. History will surely call the two roommates! Waddingham’s character lays on the charm for like five whole minutes and chops her wood with a double-headed battle axe. “This will be fun, diversifying the lesbians in this show,” I thought to myself. “We’ve got sword lesbians, we should not practice axe lesbian erasure! This will be a fun little subplot where Elora learns something!”

It was not that. Both these poor ladies get skewered by possessed Ralph Ineson in literally the same scene. What in the heck? There needs to be an episode or two of getting attached to these characters before you callously slay them.

While reviews were a bit mixed, audiences responded to Willow really well, and I also understand why they did. I am not into YA fantasy where the principal characters are all fighting over whom to kiss, but lots of people are, and everybody involved in the production here is doing a good job. If I complain about how we aren’t writing stories for the new generation in favor of wallowing in nostalgia for the stuff I liked at their age, then I can’t also complain when a show consciously writes to the sensibilities and desires of that new generation. I heard a lot of positive reviews and went through the cycle we all go through now when a streaming offering drops: Think about watching it for a month or two and then, just as I’m about to fire it up, hear the news about…

Why they cancelled it

I don’t know why! The justification that it was to cut costs is stupid. The costs were already paid. Hosting a show on your servers is obviously not a weightless expenditure, but Disney is already doing that with boatloads of streaming shows, all during an era where they continually hike prices and when I barely even have time to watch anything on Disney Plus even though I pay more than $100 a year for the privilege.

If, like me, you reject the premise that this had to do with money, then you probably are more receptive to my theory: The show was gay, and started airing the same month Bob Iger stepped back into the role of CEO of Disney.

Iger, you will note above, is very clear that he does not want to get into politics, or however he phrases it. It’s not like he’s stepping back into a company known for being daring about this stuff: Disney has cut trans storylines, relegated same-sex kissing to the background where it’s easy for China to edit it out, run movies about young women’s puberty on streaming rather than in theaters, and cancelled the goddamn Owl House. I’m sure nobody at Disney will ever say this is why they yanked Willow from their streaming service in a way where there is no legal way to watch it. I cannot, of course, prove that’s why it was done. But the effect is the same.

What are we doing here? Disney, I’ve written before, espouses a brand that is supposed to be an all-inclusive and family-friendly kind of harmless, something you can take the whole vanload of kiddos to go see and then buy tickets for Mom and Dad and their 2.5 kids for Disney World. Those kids are gay, and they are trans, and they are bi, and even if they aren’t, they all have friends who are. I, a happy little five-year-old when the 1988 film introduced the world to Davis’ Willow, am father to at least two queer kids. So, seemingly, are most of the parents my age.

Those kids will watch what their parents show them now, of course. But in another 30 years when Mark Hamill and Warwick Davis are dead, when Disney is out of franchise material to whip into spinoffs and sequels because they haven’t made anything new, when none of Disney’s stories resemble the interior lives of the queer kids who have all grown up to raise families of their own despite every foul and hateful effort to erase them, I have to wonder: Why would those kids want to give any of their money to Disney?

Best Episodes

There are just eight of them, and they all feature horny young people with pretty hair shooting magic at each other. And you can’t legally watch any of those episodes anywhere. I’d say they’re all equally good, when you look at it that way.

Shows to ease the pain

If you need simmering tensions between magic teens or you will just die, Shadow and Bone may cast a spell on you.

For wandering heroes on a quest that is less likely to get cancelled and is also gay as a Robert Jordan book series is long, The Wheel of Time just might be your kind of hot mess.

If you want fantasy that’s less about casting Counterspell than it is about fighting oppressive monoliths, try opening a portal to His Dark Materials.

And, even though you didn’t ask, NOT Falcon and the Winter Soldier, by virtue of making Erin Kellyman’s character the bad guy even though her grievances are perfectly reasonable.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.