Peacock Scraps ‘Dead Day’ From Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson After Series Order
The supernatural series Dead Day is dead at Peacock. The streaming service has scrapped the project, even though it gave Dead Day a straight-to-series order in January 2022.
According to Variety, which reported the news of Peacock’s change of heart, Universal Television now plans to find a new home for Dead Day, an adaptation of Ryan Parrott’s AfterShock Comics series of the same name.
The TV version of Dead Day would have “follow[ed] an ensemble of characters as they navigate the annual ‘dead day,’ when for one night the dead come back to complete unfinished business — be that to celebrate a night back on earth or to torment the living,” as Peacock said in a logline a year ago.
Courtesy of Peacock
Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson — who previously developed The Vampire Diaries together — would have been writers, executive producers, and co-showrunners on the series. And Dead Day’s demise marks the second recent setback for Plec: Peacock canceled her show Vampire Academy last week.
When Dead Day was announced, Peacock brass seemed hot on the idea. “Dead Day combines an exciting, high-concept premise with relatable characters and real emotion,” Lisa Katz, president of scripted content for NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, said at the time. “We jumped at the opportunity to work with Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson, who not only have tremendous individual track records with their high-quality storytelling, but have created magic together before.”
As Variety reports, Peacock is now changing course and focusing on bingeable comedies and event-series dramas, such as its new hit The Best Man: The Final Chapters. Meanwhile, as the publication points out, the scrapping of Dead Day is just one more in a recent spate of series-order reversals in the TV industry. Peacock also killed a Field of Dreams TV series from The Good Place’s Michael Schur last year, despite a straight-to-series nearly a year prior.
