In today's bummer news, Amazon has canceled its original show Z: The Beginning of Everything. The show was based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, party girl, flapper style icon, wife, and electric muse of author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Christina Ricci played Zelda with all of her sass, class, and bombast.
The show was notable because it made Zelda the star of her own life. In other versions of her story, like Midnight in Paris, she was ancillary to her famous husband. Truth be told, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been swept into the dustbin of history if wasn't for his wife: He copied passages from her diary for his novels. Christina Ricci spoke to R29 about Zelda's influence through history and she never received her due. "Well, I think because she was a person completely out of place, and I think because she was ahead of her time, it’s taken some time for us as a society to catch up to understanding her," she said.
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In the meanwhile, Z: The Beginning of Everything joins the ranks of female-lead shows that were killed by Amazon. Last year, Amazon canceled Good Girls Revolt, a show which, by all accounts, was doing well (though Amazon disputed this, saying that the show wasn't "performing at the levels we hoped for"). The show was centered around three women who were working in the publishing in the 1960s.
Amazon will be investing around $4.5 billion through 2017 on their original programming. We'd like to see them step it up with female-lead shows. After all, 2017 was a huge year for women in film: Wonder Woman and Girl's Trip were huge success in a summer that saw one the slowest ticket sales of the decade. Movies and television shows about women make money.