Prime Video has renewed Carrie for a second season, just two weeks after all eight episodes of Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation arrived on the service on October 7. Deadline first reported the pickup, and the renewal moves Flanagan two thirds of the way through the three-season story he has said from the start he wants to tell.
The decision was not a hard one. The series reached No. 1 on Prime Video in more than 105 countries and topped the streamer’s weekly global television rankings. Prime Video does not release viewing figures, but the measurement firm Luminate counted 3.6 million views in the United States in the show’s first full week. Critics went along with the audience: the season holds an 85 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Certified Fresh designation.
Summer H. Howell leads the series as Carrie White, a teenager homeschooled her entire life by her fiercely religious mother, Margaret, played by Samantha Sloyan, and newly delivered into the ordinary cruelties of public high school. Flanagan keeps the bones of King’s 1974 novel, the powers, the prom, the bucket, and rebuilds the world around them with cyberbullying, viral humiliation and school shooting drills. The ensemble includes Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Joel Oulette, Josie Totah, Arthur Conti, Thalia Dudek, Amber Midthunder, Matthew Lillard, Kate Siegel and Katee Sackhoff. Flanagan serves as showrunner and executive producer alongside King and Trevor Macy, and the series is produced by Amazon MGM Studios.
“For 50 years, audiences have known and gravitated to Carrie White’s story,” Flanagan said in a statement. “From the beginning, we imagined a story that goes far beyond the prom, and I’m incredibly grateful for Stephen’s trust and support in exploring what comes next.” King, who executive produces, added: “I can’t wait for audiences to get to see what’s down the road for Carrie White. Mike Flanagan and I are excited about what comes next. It’s bound to be thrilling.” Peter Friedlander, head of global television for Amazon MGM Studios, said the show is connecting with longtime King fans and a new generation at once, with particular strength among female viewers and international audiences.
That trust from King was earned, not given. King initially resisted Flanagan’s pitch and reversed himself only after reading the series bible, and he later called the finished show “brilliant.” The second season now takes the story where no adaptation has gone in 50 years: the first season kept the novel’s famous beats but changed its ending, leaving Carrie alive and on the run, and season two will build on ground the book never covered.
A BREAKOUT, EARNED THE HARD WAY
For actors, the most instructive number in this renewal is not 105 countries. It is 1,500, roughly the number of auditions the production saw before casting Howell, an unknown, in one of the most famous roles in horror. She was not handed a franchise. She won a search, and then she carried a global No. 1 series opposite a role that Sissy Spacek defined for half a century.
The early renewal matters to the whole ensemble, too. A planned three-season arc, backed by a streamer willing to commit two weeks after premiere, is the opposite of the renewal limbo that leaves young casts unable to plan their working lives. Prime Video has now renewed every young adult series it has premiered in the past six months. For once, the prom queen gets to keep dancing, and the actors around her get to keep their jobs.
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