‘Black Cake’ Canceled By Hulu After One Season

Hulu is not proceeding with a second season of its original drama series Black Cake, starring Adrienne Warren and Mia Isaac. The news is not surprising as it’s been 10 months since Season 1 ended its run on the streamer.

This marks a formal resolution for the series, from Women of the Movement creator Marissa Jo Cerar, Oprah Winfrey‘s Harpo Films and Aaron Kaplan‘s Kapital Entertainment, whose fate had been sealed for months. It didn’t necessarily have to be — I’d heard chatter that Netflix was interested in picking up the acclaimed drama but the inquiry didn’t go far as program relocations from one major streamer to another are very rare — and complicated — in the era of streaming wars.

Netflix had been among the original suitors for the project, which landed at Hulu in 2021 after a bidding war.

Based on the book by Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, with its first and only season landing NAACP Image Awards nominations for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Writing in a Dramatic Series for Cerar as well as a GLAAD Media Awards nomination for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. Just two weeks ago, Cerar won a Humanitas Prize for Drama Teleplay.

Black Cake is a family drama wrapped in a murder mystery that takes place in Jamaica, Rome, Scotland, England and Southern California. In the late 1960s, a runaway bride named Covey disappears into the surf off the coast of Jamaica and is feared drowned or a fugitive on the run for her husband’s murder. In present-day California, a widow named Eleanor Bennett, loses her battle with cancer, leaving her two estranged children a flash drive that holds previously untold stories of her journey from the Caribbean to America. These stories, narrated by Eleanor, shock her children and challenge everything they thought they knew about their family’s origin.

Chipo Chung, Ashley Thomas, Glynn Turman, Lashay Anderson, Faith Alabi and Ahmed Elhaj also starred. The series was executive produced by Cerar, Harpo Films’ Winfrey and Carla Gardini and Kapital Entertainment’s Kaplan. Harpo’s Emily Rudolf Kapital co-executive produced.