Ponies canceled: the spy series with Emilia Clarke will not have season 2
Despite excellent reviews, the spy thriller which has just been released on HBO Max in France ends after only eight episodes.
Bea and Twila’s adventures are already over. The American platform Peacock has decided to cancel Ponies after just one season, putting a premature end to its spy thriller in the middle of the Cold War.
Launched barely a month ago in France on HBO Max (Peacock does not exist here, but resells some of its creations to other platforms for their international distribution), the series nevertheless received a very favorable reception from critics. It notably boasts an impressive 94% positive review score on Rotten Tomatoes. But good reviews aren’t always enough. Since Peacock almost never communicates its audiences, it is difficult to precisely measure the performance of its programs. One clue, however, suggests that Ponies never found its audience: the series never appeared in the weekly Top 10 most watched streaming programs established by Nielsen.
Created by David Iserson and Susanna Fogel, the series took place in Moscow in 1977. It followed Bea, a brilliant woman, daughter of Soviet immigrants and perfectly Russian-speaking, and Twila, a young woman from a small town with a temperament as aggressive as it is intrepid. Two “ponies”, a term used in secret service jargon to designate people considered uninteresting, who work anonymously as secretaries at the American embassy. Their existence is turned upside down when their husbands are assassinated in mysterious circumstances in the USSR, dragging them against their will into a dangerous espionage affair.
The series was led by Emilia Clarke, revealed by Game of Thrones, and Haley Lu Richardson, seen notably in The White Lotus and The Edge of Seventeen.
