Any new Netflix series that premieres to much fanfare and finds instant success in terms of viewership almost immediately begins to fret about its chances of being canceled or renewed, but that isn’t something Bodies has even bothered to concern itself with.
The streaming service has almost 50 original shows with their fates still up in the air, but the acclaimed comic book adaptation that arrived as one of the biggest fresh additions to the platform last week has no interest in extending beyond a single run of episodes.
In an interview with Hello!, writer Paul Tomalin explained that the creative team made it clear from the outset that the time-hopping mystery thriller focusing on the same murder being investigated across multiple points in history was always designed to be a one-off limited series.
“We went to Netflix like ‘This is one series, this is a one and done, we wanna close this off’ because I think when you have such an amazing concept up front, you piss your audience off if you don’t solve it. As the viewer, I hate it when you get this amazing thing. And at the end it’s like, ‘Duh, duh, duh,’ and you’re like ‘Right so I’ve got to wait a year and a half.’
I think it’s a duty to an audience with something that’s this propulsive as a story concept to end it and solve it. So we really wanted you to feel that you’d seen the red curtain at the end. That being said, when you see the back end, there’s certainly a dot dot dot. But the premise that the show sets comes to an end.”
Bad news for anyone hoping Bodies would become a regular fixture of the Netflix schedule, but if you haven’t seen it yet, than at least you’ll know it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger.