Lovecraft Country showrunner Misha Green teased what fans could have expected from the show’s now-cancelled second season. Set in the 1950s, the show’s first season was based on Mark Ruff’s popular dark fantasy novel of the same name. Both the show and the novel mixed the eldritch horror of H.P. Lovecraft with the real-life horrors experienced by Black communities in America during the Jim Crow-era. The series followed Da 5 Bloods star Jonathan Majors as Atticus Freeman who, upon returning from the Korean war, searches for his estranged father and uncovers a dark side to his family’s history.
Produced by Green alongside Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams, the show also starred Birds of Prey's Jurnee Smollett, The Wire's Michael Kenneth Williams, and The Gifted's Jamie Chung. Originally intended as a limited series, Lovecraft Country was a ratings draw for HBO akin to 2019’s Watchmen. However, on July 3rd, the network announced that they would not be moving forward with Lovecraft Country season 2 despite its popularity with audiences.
Green responded to the cancellation of Lovecraft Country with a tweet, thanking audiences for engaging with the show and for their support during its first season. She also revealed that season 2 was set to be titled Lovecraft Country: Supremacy and would have taken place “in a new world, and that new world is a country that sits precisely where The United States used to sit." Check out the full tweet below:
Most interesting is the map included in the tweet by Green which she described as “a taste of the Season 2 Bible”. The map shows the United States divided into four distinct zones: the ‘Tribal Nations of the West’ dominating the western portion of the map, the ‘Jefferson Commonwealth’ to the northeast, the ‘New Negro Republic’ in the south, and the ‘Whitelands’ situated between the three. The map also included two markers in the ‘Whitelands’ area, but no additional information was provided. Despite the lack of further detail, it seems as though the series may have focused on conflicts between the four nations.
Also noticeable is Green's inclusion of the hashtag #noconfederate, presumably in reference to the proposed series by Game of Thrones showrunners D. B. Weiss and David Benioff. Confederate would have shared a vaguely similar concept to Green’s proposed series, albeit in a world where the American Civil War resulted in a stalemate and slavery remained legal in a successfully seceded American Confederacy. The show received massive backlash on social media upon its announcement in 2017, around the same time that Green’s own Underground series based on the Underground Railroad was cancelled. Despite the backlash, Confederate was not officially cancelled until January 2020.
It’s unsure whether the proposed second season of Lovecraft Country would have featured a returning cast in an anthology style approach, although certain casting rumors may have affected that. Majors is set to appear next in Netflix’s upcoming Western The Harder They Fall, as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania as Kang the Conqueror. He is also rumored to possibly appear as Kang in the final episodes of Loki. Green herself has been announced to penning the script for Tomb Raider 2, but it is still disappointing that audiences will not have the opportunity to see her vision for a second season of Lovecraft Country. It is possible however that the series could be picked up by a different network or streaming service in the coming weeks, but with no new information forthcoming, audiences will just have to wait and hope.
Source: Misha Green