Another day, another Netflix show gets cancelled out of the blue. We’d pretend to be surprised, but this sort of thing happens so often it makes us not want to invest in any new Netflix shows. This time the show on the chopping block is Fate: The Winx Saga, which just ended its second season.
Showreunner Brian Young announced the news on Instagram, confirming that there won’t be a third season. That’s despite the fact that the second season finale, which was released in mid-September, ended on a cliffhanger. Netflix can be a real monster like that sometimes.
Young thanked the cast and crew for their hard work making the most recent season, and for the show’s fans for tuning in. So everyone will, presumably, be moving on to new and different projects.
Fate: The Winx Saga is based on the animated Nickelodeon show Winx Club, which ran from 2004 to 2009, and then again from 2011 to 2019. That’s eight seasons, clocking in 208 24-minute episodes and four hour-long specials.
The live action version is a teen drama, following some of the same principles. Fairies and other magical creatures live in various dimensions adjacent to earth, with the show set primarily in the “Otherworld." The show follows Bloom (Abigail Cowen), a fire fairy who was raised on Earth and unaware of her heritage, as she joins the magical boarding school Alfea.
There Bloom befriends four other fairies, Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen), Aisha (Precious Mustapha) and Musa (Alihsa Applebaum). The quartet set about mastering their powers, and fighting off villains — including ancient monsters called “Burned Ones” who want to return to Otherworld.
As things stand, it seems Fate: The Winx Saga was reasonably popular when both its seasons hit Netflix. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the first season spent three weeks at the top of the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for original shows, and the second season for two. Netflix’s own internal figures noted that users spent 161 million hours watching the show in the month following its September 16 release.
It’s a long way off from the likes of Bridgerton season 2 and Stranger Things season 4, which clocked in a respective 656.26 million and 1.35 billion viewing hours. Which may explain, at least in part, why Netflix pulled the plug. There will likely be other reasons too because, unlike broadcast television, high viewing figures are usually not completely indicative of success on Netflix.
Fate: The Winx Saga is definitely not a show for everyone, but the fans out there have my sympathies. We’ve all been at the receiving end of a show’s cancellation, both on Netflix and elsewhere. There are countless shows that will never get any resolution, because studios and networks decided to pull the plug right after a monster of a cliffhanger.
