How Lucifer returned with a new lease on life
Fourth season of the series dropped on the streaming service after being ditched by Fox
Lucifer has been to hell and back. The cast and producers of the drama about the Prince of Darkness who gets bored in hell and winds up in Los Angeles as a nightclub owner and police crime consultant are rejoicing over its resurrection by Netflix, which followed a painful cancellation by Fox.
The fourth season of the series dropped on the streaming service, which revived the show after a legion of fans in this country and abroad staged an intense Twitter campaign protesting its ouster and pleading for a reprieve from another network. The pickup is one of the first instances where Netflix, which specialises in original series and films, has picked up a show from a major US broadcast network. (Netflix next month will air the third season of Designated Survivor, which was
cancelled last year by ABC.)
“It feels amazing, actually,” Tom Ellis, who stars as Lucifer Morningstar, says on a soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank where the show is filmed. “It was rather an upsetting experience to be cancelled. I was not ready for the show to be over.”
Adds executive producer Ildy Mondrovich: “We’re the little engine that could. When we were cancelled, I cried in the closet for a couple of hours. But it’s actually the best thing that’s ever happened to us, because we found out how people were really connected to the show.”
Although Lucifer, which is based on a DC Comics character, is no longer bound by broadcast standards and regulations, don’t expect the series to be more devilish in its storytelling.
“It was important for us to remain true to the fans who saved us,” Mondrovich says. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. And Netflix encouraged us to have cliffhangers at the end of each episode, and write to the serialised format a lot more. That was fun for us to do.”
The other major switch is a shorter season. The first three seasons of the show weighed in with more than 20 episodes apiece, while the Netflix version has only 10 episodes.
“We can be leaner and meaner — we can get right down to telling our story,” Ellis says. That story reached a cliffhanger finale in the third season when Lucifer, whose usual form is a handsome playboy with a smooth English accent, changes physically into his demonic self, much to the horror of his partner — and potential love interest — detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German), the one person who has been immune to Lucifer’s charms.
“We wrote that ending because we just knew we were coming back,” says executive producer Joe Henderson. “When we were cancelled, we were crushed.”
Ellis was attending a
Lucifer fan convention in Rome when he got the bad news.
“I had just come offstage from doing this Q&A,” he says. “I had been put on this pedestal for an hour, and had gotten back on a minibus to get back to the hotel to have dinner with friends. I got a call from Joe that the show had been cancelled. Everyone on the bus knew what that conversation was.”
Fox executives first blamed the cancellation on ratings, saying that
Lucifer was not drawing enough viewership to warrant a renewal.
But later, then-Fox Television Group Chief Executive Dana Walden also said that economics had played a role.
The series is produced by Warner Bros Studios in association with Jerry Bruckheimer Television, and “we couldn’t justify the economics” of paying for a show from another studio, she said in interviews.
Fans of the show were quick to register their anger on Twitter with the hashtags #SaveLucifer and #PickUpLucifer. According to @twittertv, 3.64 million tweets and 5.63 million retweets included #SaveLucifer between May 8 and April 8 last year.