Entertainment Weekly recently interviewed Mike O’Malley, the showrunner of Heels.
During the interview, O’Malley confirmed that the search for a new home for the series has begun as STARZ recently canceled the show after its second season. He said,
“I really do think it’s going to have a life someplace else.”
You can check out some additional highlights from the interview below:
On the second season: “It was really, really challenging in the sense that we weren’t able to promote this show and talk about this show [due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes]. We knew when we finished the season, all the cast and everyone involved with the show, we’re going to have to work our tail off to get people to watch the show, because Starz doesn’t have the same marketing and advertising muscle behind it. When the strike happened and they said we couldn’t talk about it, it wasn’t like Heels was on buses in every city in America. We’re on Friday nights in the summertime. Starz worked really hard on making a great show and funding a great show, and we did too. We knew that we were going to have to carry some of the marketing [work]. We were supposed to go to Comic-Con and we didn’t.”
On whether they intended for the series to end on season two: “We did not intend, nor do we intend, for this to be the last episode of the show. One of the things that we’re trying to do in this show is honor wrestlers, honor anybody who has a dream and the endurance to pursue that dream. Sometimes that endurance can be misguided. For instance, I used to like tap dancing. I was terrible at it, but when I was in college, to get out of the University of New Hampshire with a theater degree, I had to take tap dance. You have never seen a tap dancer worse than me. And can you imagine if I spent my whole life like, “Hey, man, I have dream! I’m going to bring tap dancing back!” So, one of the things we were trying to talk about in the show, if you want to be a professional wrestler — but you also want to have a family and you want to have financial stability and you want to have a body that still works — these are all sacrifices that you make. And Jack Spade, the sacrifice that happened in this family is that his father [played by David James Elliott] wanted it so badly and was so disappointed, he killed himself. What the show is really about is, how does our humanity get in the way of our own happiness? What happens at the end of that episode is Jack, who has been treated a certain way by his father, sees Ace being praised by the Continuum executive, Jen Lussier [played by Emmy Raver-Lampman]. She’s rooting for Ace, and here’s Jack, still that boy who wanted to be loved by his dad. He lets his own ego [take over]. He executes the leap. That moment is just him pushing it one step too far because his brother is being celebrated instead of him. And that’s the tragedy of it.”
