Hollywood Q&A

Q: Why did Julia Roberts leave “Homecoming” after the first season?

A: The short answer is because she’s Julia Roberts and she can do what she wants. That’s obviously not the whole story, though.

The bigger reason is that she had only signed on for a single season, and the show went in a very different story direction for Season 2. However, it’s not clear which came first.

With its second season, the direct-to-streaming Amazon series “Homecoming” became an anthology show — that is, its second season followed new characters and a (mostly) new story (though it retained one or two plot elements to keep it in the same universe).

It’s possible that the producers only ever intended to keep Roberts on the show for one season. The first season was based on a podcast of the same name and went on to tell the whole story of that podcast by the end of the season. However, when Amazon signed the deal to turn the podcast into a show, it had agreed to two seasons right off the bat.

At the same time, it also signed the contract with Roberts for one season only, which means it’s possible it was already thinking that the second season would go on without her. Of course, it’s also possible it was hoping to just sign her second-season deal later.

In that second scenario, it’s possible that Roberts was being cagier than Amazon was; just because the company was willing to sign for two seasons up front — essentially placing a big bet that the show would be a hit — doesn’t mean Roberts had to make the same gamble.

Q: Could you please tell me if and when “Beat Shazam” will be back on TV? I haven’t seen it in a while and I really loved it.

A: I can tell you if, but I can’t tell you when. (And so, you can probably guess the “if” part.)

“Beat Shazam,” the musical game show hosted by Jamie Foxx and based on the popular mobile app, has been renewed for a fourth season, but it seems that season has been waylaid by the pandemic. Of course, a lot of shows have had their schedules disrupted and have managed to recover, which makes “Beat Shazam” a bit of a mystery. It was renewed back in January 2020, before the pandemic even started. That suggested there was at least a chance it would be back in May 2020 as usual (all three of its past seasons debuted in the month of May) — there was hope it had shot the episodes before the shutdown happened. It seems, however, that was not the case, and we’ve now reached the second May in a row without news of a return date.

Q: I just watched the episode of “The Walking Dead” in which [spoilers redacted]. Was that really the last one of the season? Nothing much happened.

A: “The Walking Dead” had been taking a loose approach to the concept of seasons before the pandemic, and it only got worse as filming restrictions blew “normal” out of the water. And so, the season finale you just watched (which aired on AMC on April 4, just to be clear without going into plot details) wasn’t originally intended to be the season finale.

The most recent few episodes were sort of tacked on to the end of Season 10. They were shot during the pandemic, after the showrunners thought Season 10 was finished, and so they were a sort of season unto themselves in terms of themes, air dates and how they were filmed.

Because the final six episodes of Season 10 were written and filmed during the pandemic, the writers opted to feature fewer people together at once. The result was a series of close character studies rather than sprawling social examinations. (It’s ironic to think that a show about a fictional pandemic had to transform itself because of a real pandemic.)

So, what we got in the final episode was a close look at the past and present of one character in particular: the villainous Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, “Supernatural”). In this case, at least, the writers had a template to work from: this episode, more than most, was based directly on the original “Walking Dead” comics.