The beginning wasn’t the end for Amazon’s Z: The Beginning Of Everything, it seems. The Hollywood Reporter writes that Amazon has renewed the Zelda Fitzgerald-inspired series for a second season. A spokesperson for the streaming service told THR that Amazon had been sold on a “good pitch for season two,” but the publication speculates that perhaps it wanted to counteract any notion that it was an inhospitable home for female-fronted projects. That opinion stems in part from the controversy over the cancellation of Good Girls Revolt, which resulted in charges from that show’s creator that the studio simply didn’t “care” about the drama about women fighting for equal rights at a magazine in the late 1960s. On top of that, THR points to a recent Vox article arguing that the development process has a “sexist loophole” given that male showrunners have received straight-to-series order while female ones have not. Amazon did just invest in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, giving it a two-season order, but it also went through the pilot season.
Z was created by Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin, counts Ricci as an executive producer. In our review, The A.V. Club noted that its “main advantage is a previously unexplored feminist take on what Zelda’s life must have been like.“