The zany sci-fi adventure Avenue 5 is officially over at HBO. On Friday, a report from Variety revealed that the live-action series has officially been cancelled after two seasons on the platform. Created by Veep and The Thick of It‘s Armando Iannucci, the series originally debuted on HBO in January of 2020. It debuted its second season in October of 2022, after COVID-19 delays pushed back the filming of Season 2 to late 2021. The series starred Hugh Laurie, Josh Gad, Zach Woods, Rebecca Front, Suzy Nakamura, Lenora Crichlow, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Ethan Phillips.
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“Going to space with Armando Iannucci has been an incredible journey,” an HBO spokesperson said in a statement. “While we will not be moving forward with a third season of ‘Avenue 5,’ we look forward to many more adventures together.”
What is Avenue 5 about?
In Avenue 5, while manning a luxury spacecraft owned by Herman Judd (Gad), Captain Ryan Clark (Laurie) finds himself in over his head when the ship is thrown disastrously off-course – turning what was meant to be an eight-week cruise into an eight-year journey. The series was a co-production between HBO and Sky UK, with executive producers on the series including Iannuci, Kevin Loader, and Will Smith.
“The production scale is bananas,” Woods told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview late last year. “I mean, it’s this gigantic … Someone was saying, it looks like an airport terminal at United Arab Emirates. It’s like a first-class terminal but blown up. It’s this very weird, massive, vacuous space, and the story has all of this literally cosmic scale to it, and that is unusual. I’m used to playing more, even in Silicon Valley, where there were billionaires and things floating around, by and large, the story took place in conference rooms and houses and things, but to be in a thing where people’s blood is turning to ice because they’re out in the frosty expansive space is a completely new experience.”
This won’t be the last time that Iannuci collaborates with HBO, as he is currently executive producing The Franchise, a pilot about the production of a franchise superhero movie.
What do you think of HBO cancelling Avenue 5 after two seasons? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
