As Prime Video is riding the big viewership wave of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s third and final season, the streamer has renewal decisions to make on three other YA series that premiered in May and June, We Were Liars, Motorheads and Overcompensating.
Overcompensating and We Were Liars already had been looking promising for a pickup. A comment about We Were Liars by Laura Lancaster, Head of US SVOD TV Development and Series – Co-Productions at Amazon MGM Studios, bodes well for the thriller drama, further boosting the chances of Julie Plec’s and Carina Adly MacKenzie’s adaptation of E. Lockhart’s bestselling book.
While speaking about executive Kara Smith who, along with Tom Lieber, have been given new, expanded roles, Lancaster wrote in an internal memo, “Her extraordinary leadership and innovative vision helped craft The Better Sister and We Were Liars into must-watch series that have captured the cultural conversation.”
While The Better Sister, starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, was billed as a limited series, We Were Liars was designed to be an ongoing series with potential for multiple seasons.
The praise for We Were Liars Season 1’s cultural impact by Lancaster follows encouraging recent comments by Amazon MGM Studios head of TV Vernan Sanders.
“That’s one of the shows where the writers are hard at work, working on what a Season 2 would be,” he told Deadline last month. “We’ve been really excited by the results we’ve seen there, and it’s one of the shows that I hope will have some positive news to report soon. They’re hard at work in presenting us with material on a Season 2, and there’s been quite a clamor from fans of that show to keep the story going. So we’ll see.”
At the time of the Season 1 finale in June, Plec, MacKenzie and Lockhart, who all executive produce the series, spoke about Season 2.
“I’m not allowed to talk about Season 2 plans, but if you watch We Were Liars all the way til the end and you watch the little coda, you can see that that coda tips to the start of Family of Liars,” Lockhart said, referring to her prequel book.
We Were Liars follows Cadence Sinclair Eastman and her tight-knit inner circle, nicknamed the Liars, during their summer escapades on her grandfather’s New England private island. Alyn Lind, Esther McGregor, Joseph Zada and Shubham Maheshwari led the cast of Season 1 as the eponymous Liars. The series is produced by Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, and Amazon MGM Studios.