Filmmaker Gregg Araki has revealed that a second season of his 2019 Starz series "Now Apocalypse" was fully written and paid for before it was scrapped, in a twist that echoed the show's own plot. Speaking to Deadline while promoting his new film "I Want Your Sex", Araki said the cast had been paid and the season was in prepping stages when an executive shake-up at the network derailed it, mirroring a storyline within the unmade season itself.

Araki explained that in the planned Season 2, the character Carly, played by Kelli Berglund, has a development executive who gets fired and her show is put into turnaround by episode nine, which he said "literally" happened to the real production when the show's Starz executive was let go amid wider network changes. "Now Apocalypse", co-written by Araki and Karley Sciortino and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh and Gregory Jacobs, ran for one 10-episode season from March to May 2019 before Starz cancelled it that July, with the network's then-COO Jeff Hirsch calling it "a great experiment."