Katy Keene‘s first season came to a close on Thursday night, leaving each of its four main characters — Katy (Lucy Hale), Josie (Ashleigh Murray), Jorge (Jonny Beauchamp), and Pepper (Julia Chan) — a little bit closer to achieving their dreams but with new mysteries and challenges right on the horizon. If you’ve been waiting to check out The CW‘s high fashion fairytale spinoff of the network’s fan-favorite Riverdale, however, you’re in luck. The complete first season of Katy Keene is now streaming for free on The CW’s website.
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All thirteen episodes of Katy Keene are available to stream via The CW’s digital platform including both the website and the app, offering fans an opportunity to check out the series. However, while The CW is the only place that fans can stream the series for free it won’t be the only place fans can check out Katy Keene. The series will debut on HBO Max when the new service launches at the end of the month as part of the network’s deal with HBO. The series will not be available on Netflix as The CW’s parent companies, Warner Bros. and CBS opted not to renew their output deal with Netflix which had previously seen past seasons of CW series arrive on Netflix about a week after their seasons ended on The CW.
And streaming viewership of Katy Keene could be critical to the series getting a second season. The series has not yet been renewed for a second season and according to The CW president Mark Pedowitz, the network wants to see how the series performs on digital.
“We are incredibly pleased with the creative [direction] of this show,” Pedowitz explained. “The producers and the talented cast have done a terrific job. The linear ratings have been soft, but we have seen some good streaming viewership. We’ve gone to the studio and the producers and we’re extending the option of when we can pick it up so we could see how it’s performing once the full season is up, which will happen tonight, with the finale. And also, we are counting on that it will appear alongside the launch of HBO Max, and we’re hoping that that, too, will help it. And we’ll make a decision in a few weeks after that. We believe that the show will work streaming-wise. We’d like to see it perform a little bit better, but we have no creative issues on the show.”
Wanting to check on a show’s streaming performance as an important metric isn’t exactly a foreign concept, especially at The CW. Riverdale, Katy Keene‘s sister series, exploded in popularity when it hit streaming, as has the network’s non-genre series, All American.
Katy Keene follows its titular character (played by Lucy Hale), Josie McCoy (Ashleigh Murray), Pepper Smith (Julia Chan), and Jorge Lopez (Jonny Beauchamp), as they chase their dreams in New York City.
“It is a watershed moment for the company,” Archie CEO John Goldwater previously told ComicBook.com of Katy Keene. “We are called Archie Comics, so most people don’t realize the breadth and depth of our IP. We literally have hundreds of brands, thousands of characters, obviously some way more well-known than others. Comic book people know Katy, but the world at large doesn’t know Katy. And for us to be able to start to mine the depth of our library is a transformative moment for Archie Comics. It’s such an exciting moment in time for the company and it’s as exciting as when Riverdale first came along. It is that kind of seminal moment.”
