Max renews Harley Quinn for a fifth season

This week, Netflix announced the cancellation of several TV shows, including its hit fantasy series Shadow and Bone. After a long year where studios scrambled to deal with striking writers and actors, it’s harder than ever to know whether a show will be coming back or not. In this grim hour, the unlikeliest of heroes comes to offer a ray of hope: Warner Bros. Discovery.

The studio that owns Max will be renewing Harley Quinn for a fifth season. The animated series, which stars Kaley Cuoco as the Joker’s famously insane ex-girlfriend, has been poking aggressive fun at all things Batman for years now; even as WBD hasn’t known what to do with DC heroes on the big screen, animated shows like Harley Quinn and — more recently — My Adventures With Superman have been killing it on the TV side of things.

So I’m glad to hear Harley Quinn is coming back, especially since it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Remember: Warner Bros. Discovery is the studio that once canceled an almost-complete Batgirl movie to get a tax write-off. More recently, they canceled a new animated/live-action hybrid movie called Coyote vs. Acme, despite it being fully complete, testing well, and starring John Cena. The studio decided to reverse course and shop the movie around elsewhere in response to a powerful backlash, but obviously WBD is willing to play fast and loose with movies and TV shows produced under its care.

In fact, I wonder if renewing Harley Quinn — or at least announcing it now — could be a way of doing some damage control following the Coyote vs. Acme incident. But that’s me trying to figure out how WBD CEO David Zaslav thinks. For all I know, he goes into his office every morning, throws a bunch of squirrel bones on the floor, divines meanings from the patterns and then does what they tell him. With this kind of decision-making, it’s as likely as anything else.

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