Despite the buzz surrounding its Netflix debut this fall, the series Boots will not receive a second season. A new gay series from the platform ends after Heartstopper.
A hammer blow for the Boots teams. Barely two months after its Netflix arrival, Deadline reports that the series created by Andy Parker will not return for a second season. A puzzling announcement as it had enjoyed convincing early viewership, surpassing 9 million views after a week, ranking second among the world’s most-watched programs on the streaming platform. Benefiting from fairly positive reviews, the military series also generated a nice buzz on social media.
Loosely inspired by Greg Cope White’s memoirs, titled The Pink Marine, the series follows Cameron, a young gay man who decides to follow his straight best friend to escape a tense family situation. He thus ends up joining the Marines in the early 1990s, at a time when it was outright forbidden to be gay within the American military. The young gay man will thus have to conceal his identity in order not to make waves in a macho environment to the extreme.
Series Cancellations
Over the eight episodes that make up its first (and now only) season, Boots brilliantly unpacks the nuances of gay life at that age, even though one hasn’t come out yet: the comments and homophobic taunts, the injunction to masculinity, the discomfort when you find yourself in a closed space with other straight men… I tried to summon all the anxiety I felt as a teenager when I was in the closet, we are told by Miles Heizer, the series’ lead actor, in the winter issue of Têtu. I remembered how distressed I was when I found myself alone with boys. There are certain scenes that exhausted me emotionally.
Could it be that criticisms from the American government led to Boots’ cancellation? In October, about two weeks after its arrival on Netflix, the Pentagon spokesperson for the United States, Kingsley Wilson, accused the streaming giant of responding to an “ideological agenda” with this series, which he labeled as an “unwashed woke trash”.
In any case, this abrupt ending of Boots adds to that announced in April for Heartstopper, which will not receive a fourth season but a film to conclude the plot. Today, it is the fans of the Spanish series Olympo who worry about rumors of cancellation of the sequel.
