One More Hit From ‘Zoey’ – The Roku Channel Brings Back ‘Playlist’ for Christmas Movie Finale
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist has room for one more hit.
The Emmy-winning show, which launched in 2020, was cancelled at the end of its second season by NBC. Wednesday it was announced that it found new life (though for now, a short one) on Roku’s ad-supported streaming channel.
Roku is ordering a two-hour movie continuing the story of the musical drama Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, marking the first film greenlit for Roku’s channel, not counting the library it acquired back in January from doomed short-form video platform Quibi.
The project, to be called Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas, will also be available to stream on Roku in Canada and in the U.K. As part of the deal with the show’s production studio Lionsgate, Roku was also granted the streaming rights to all 25 episodes of the show. Those will also be available to stream later this fall on The Roku Channel in the United States.
Variety reports that the entire cast, which includes Mary Steenburgen, Peter Gallagher and Bernadette Peters, will returning, and production should commence this month. No plot details are available, but the announcement said that the holiday-set follow-up will pick things up where the TV show left off in its Season 2 finale.
“It’s a transcendent show, it’s something that connects with people across the country,” Colin Davis, head of original scripted programming at Roku, said of Zoey. “That connection with the audience is what makes bringing a holiday-themed film like Zoey to life with the original cast so special.”
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist was canceled by NBC in June after two seasons on the network, and it went on to earn five Emmy nominations this year, which is the second-most for any primetime broadcast show. The show won an Emmy award last year for outstanding choreography for scripted programming, and also landed a Golden Globe nomination for Levy.
Davis said the decision was made to pick up a Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist movie, as opposed to more episodes, in order to get the revival to audiences as quickly as possible to capitalize on the demand.
“It’s what can be done quickly,” he said. “We wanted to not slow down the momentum that exists around the show and the fandom for this show and make sure that people get an encore quickly.”
Whether this is a first step to a revival of Zoey, Davis didn’t say. “I’m just focused on the encore right now,” he said. “We think this wraps everything up into a nice holiday package. Everything we’ve done so far has been with some real education behind it. [But] we’ll never say never.”