British comedy drama series The Duchess won’t be returning for a second season on Netflix.
Katherine Ryan, the creator, writer and star of The Duchess, revealed on Wednesday’s episode of Vicky Pattison’s The Secret To… podcast that the streamer canceled the series after a single six-episode season that premiered last September.
“[Netflix] didn’t want to make any more, not enough people watched it,” said Ryan. “I think something like 10 million people watched it in 28 days and that wasn’t enough.”
Ryan, however, admitted that she’s “not terribly sad about” the cancellation. “I feel like it’s a whole lot of work, a whole lot of time to make a sitcom,” she explained. “I was so grateful to able to make it, but I think it speaks for itself. I kind of like the way it ended.”
In The Duchess, Ryan played the role of Katherine, a fashionably disruptive single mom living in London, who was starting to consider having another kid, provided she could find a suitable father for the child first. The series also starred Katy Byrne as Katherine’s daughter Olive, Rory Keenan as Katherine’s off-the-grid ex Shep, and Steen Raskopoulos as Katherine’s new orthodontist boyfriend Evan.
Though Netflix opted not to renew The Duchess for a second season, Ryan had actually started working on the then-potential sophomore run of the show as early as last September.
“I’m writing the second series anticipating that hopefully I will get to do a second series but I still have so much to say,” Ryan told The Sun that month. “And of course, dealing with a child, they enter new phases of their lives so quickly and parents have to adapt to that so I think there’s lots more story to tell, but it depends on whether or not people watch it.”
While Ryan currently has no upcoming shows on Netflix, Deadline reported last March that Amazon was in the early stages of creating a show with the comedienne. Currently titled Backstage with Katherine Ryan, the potential series is housed at Expectation, the U.K production company behind Amazon’s popular motoring series The Grand Tour.