After five seasons, the hit drama series “Good Trouble” has come to an end this week with an extended season finale, as the Coterie crew says farewell as everyone takes control of their futures.

“Good Trouble” follows the residents of Downtown Los Angeles’ The Coterie as they juggle career, love, and friendship and learn that standing up for what you believe in requires making a little noise and getting into trouble.  The show is a spin-off of the popular drama series, “The Fosters”, which also ran for five seasons from 2013 to 2017.

With the future of the Freeform channel in doubt as Disney begins to cut back on how many linear channels it has, as last year, Spectrum dropped the channel, along with many others, from its lineup, in favour of getting access to the ad-supported version of Disney+.  This has resulted in Freeform pulling away from scripted content like “Good Trouble”.

There were also additional issues caused by last summer’s actor’s and writer’s strikes, which impacted on the final season, but recently, the “Good Trouble” showrunner Joanna Johnson spoke with TVLine about the cancellation of the show and how Disney allowed them to finish the story properly, even though the season had wrapped filming.

“After the writers’ strike ended, we were making schedules to get up and running, and I got a call from the network… saying, ‘Just a head’s up, a lot of things are changing in the business right now, and so, we kind of don’t know if we’re, for sure, going to get to pick the show up. We were all very surprised because we had left Season 5 99.9% sure we were coming back for Season 6.”

She also explained how the Spectrum deal was a major issue, along with all of the other budget cuts going on within Disney:

“The strikes were long and bruising.  And all the networks and studios are scrambling because they’re losing money. They have to make cuts in different places. And Freeform was not part of the Spectrum cable deal, and so, they lost a lot of their viewers. So just a lot of things kind of happened.”

While Disney revealed that the show had been cancelled and wouldn’t be returning for a sixth season, Joanna doesn’t feel like the show was cancelled in the same way as other shows.

“I don’t feel like the show was cancelled.  I feel like things changed, and the landscape changed, and they just couldn’t afford to do the show.”

The team behind the show did try fighting with executives to persuade them to do a sixth and final season, even approaching Hulu about continuing the show away from Freeform, with Joanne explaining that Simran Sethi, EVP of Programming and Content Strategy for ABC Entertainment and Freeform had

 “fought so hard for us, trying to get us that Season 6. She’s been phenomenal, and so has [President of Disney Television Group] Craig Erwich.” They all tried. But I really understand it comes down to business decisions, and those are hard”.

However, the finances for the show just no longer made sense, and with Disney cutting every division’s budget and reducing the amount of general entertainment they create, it didn’t come to pass.  However, they did agree to give them a small budget to finish the long-running drama series with a proper ending, which most shows that are cancelled nowadays never get, but with over ten years of history within this universe, it does feel right that it’s ended properly, especially as its rare a show gets to five seasons due to the increased costs.

“We had a little bit of savings left from Season 5, and I said, ‘Could we please use that money and try to shoot some new scenes so that it felt like a real series finale?’ and [Simran] went to bat for us and we were able to do that, and I really appreciate that from Disney and [network] and her and Craig, because they didn’t have to do that. That doesn’t happen very often. Once the show is already shot and in the can, they don’t usually let you open up the finale and shoot more scenes. So I was super grateful for that.”

The showrunner Joanna Johnson also revealed what she wanted to do for the finale, had she been given the budget:

I really wanted to do Jamie and Callie’s wedding. I really did. I’d always felt that that was going to be the series finale to the show, whether it was Season 6 or Season 7, who knows. So I was really sad, but we just couldn’t afford it. We just didn’t have the money to do it. I wanted to bring back every Fosters person and bring some surprise Easter egg characters back from The Fosters for people, and also from Good Trouble that we haven’t seen in a while. But unfortunately, we just didn’t have the time or the money to do it.

“Good Trouble”, along with “The Fosters” are available to stream now on Hulu and Hulu On Disney+.  It’s also available to stream on Disney+ around the world.

What do you think of “Good Trouble” coming to an end?  Let us know on social media!

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

View all posts