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Legion Season 3: Jeph Loeb Clarifies That the Show Is "Ending" Not "Canceled"
There was blood in the water when it came to Marvel TV in the last several months. The partnership between Netflix and Marvel seems to have ended, Marvel canceled the remaining two shows just today, but one of the bigger surprises was earlier this month when it was announced that Legion was ending after the upcoming third season. A lot of Marvel TV shows have been canceled recently, but Head of Marvel TV Jeph Loeb told the Decider that he wanted to clarify that what happened at Netflix is not the same as what happened to Legion.
"I'd like to sort of shave that story a little bit," Loeb said during a one-on-one interview with Decider. "When Noah [Hawley] came in the first day and told us what he wanted to do he told us the end of the story. It wasn't like 'I haven't really figured out where this is gonna go, but this is what I wanna do.' I've very often referred to being on the show as being on the Magical Mystery Tour and that Noah was our bus driver and that eventually he was going to say 'Okay, time to get off.'"
In TV it's very uncommon that a showrunner is given the opportunity to end a show on their own terms. Sometimes, a show is hanging on the edge of cancellation and the network comes to an agreement that it's time to end. For example; a show like iZombie was always hovering on the edge of cancellation and they decided the upcoming season would be the last. Legion is a show that was doing well both and FX and Marvel still decided to let showrunner Noah Hawley end the show on his own terms.
"In [Legion's] case, Noah came to us and said 'This is where I want to end this particular story' and we said "Great, that's perfectly fine. Please know that you're welcome back and that the toys are still in the box, please come back and play with the toys,'" Loeb said. "It would not surprise me if there's something else that we do. The same thing goes at FX. If [FX CEO] John Landgraf tomorrow said 'What do you think about …?' I would go 'That sounds like the greatest thing ever, let's go do it.' So it's a very different situation."
It sounds like if Hawley ever wanted to come and play in the extremely unique universe he created, both FX and Marvel would love to have him back. For now, we have to wait until June to see how Hawley and his team decide to wrap up one of the most unique superhero shows ever created.