Peacock Exec Explains Canceling ‘Vampire Academy,’ ‘One of Us Is Lying’

Two weeks after Peacock canceled One of Us Is Lying after its second season and fellow YA series Vampire Academy after its first, Susan Rovner has some explaining to do.

Rovner, the chair of entertainment content at NBCUniversal TV and streaming, sounded off on those cancelations and Peacock’s young-adult challenges in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s TV’s Top 5 podcast.

“Both One of Us Is Lying and Vampire Academy I hold up as excellent, quality shows,” Rovner said on the podcast. “I think [Vampire Academy co-creator] Julie Plec is really, truly one of the best showrunners, and she did a phenomenal, phenomenal job on that show. I’m really, really proud of it.”

But Rovner speculated it was “too soon” for Peacock to release those two shows. “I think what we realized is we have to get the parents [watching Peacock] before we get the teens,” she said. “And I’m really hoping that once we get the parents with shows like Poker Face and shows like [The] Traitors, that we will be able to do a show like Vampire Academy a few years from now. Unfortunately, the timing really wasn’t right, and we didn’t have the scale yet to support bringing in a young adult audience for that show. But it has nothing to do with the quality of either show.”

‘One of Us Is Lying’ (Peacock)

In the same interview, Rovner also explained why Peacock scrapped production on Dead Day, a supernatural series that would have reunited Plec with her Vampire Diaries co-creator Kevin Williamson. “It was more of a creative decision,” Rovner said. “Just from looking at what we thought would work on the platform, we just ultimately didn’t think that Dead Day completely fit it. … Having Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec working together was a dream, and I’m definitely hoping we can figure out another project that will work for the platform, because I want to work with them forever.”

The exec also said that the difficulty reaching young-adult audiences isn’t Peacock-specific. “I think it’s just about launching a new service,” she said. “I think when you launch a new service, you have to get to scale. And we are getting to scale. I think we’re growing so quickly. … So I think, again, within a year to two years, our scale should be big enough that we can try shows like that again.”