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Harleen Frances Quinzel ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Announced in conjunction with major changes to the DC Universe platform, WarnerMedia revealed on Friday that the acclaimed animated series Harley Quinn would return for a third season. The twist: The next batch of episodes will run exclusively on HBO Max.
Harley Quinn, which stars Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco as the voice of the antihero, began its life on the DC Universe subscription service, which houses everything from digital comics to a library of classic DC movies and shows and a handful of originals, including Doom Patrol and Titans. With the emergence of HBO Max as a Netflix contender, the logical move was to put the series where the most people would actually watch it. The August 2020 arrival of the show to HBO Max saw interest skyrocket.
Earlier this month, another WarnerMedia subsidiary, Adult Swim, canceled the long-running and forever weird animated series The Venture Bros.. The good news: Harley Quinn is a worthy successor, spinning familiar DC villains and heroes in a similar way to how Venture Bros. treated ’60s cartoon characters. Co-creator and showrunner Patrick Schumacker has taken full advantage of his ability to do whatever the heck he feels like with the pantheon.
“That was always kind of granted to us by DC,” Schumacker told Polygon earlier this year. “Deviating from the larger continuity was always a part of the show. We took certain characters in a very different direction, like Commissioner Gordon, and in the first season we killed Jason Praxis, who isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a major character. But the first season was well-liked by both general audiences, as well as internally, with the executives at Warner Brothers and DC Universe really digging the show. [We realized] we could start killing major characters in season 2 without really running into any sort of opposition.”
No timeframe for Harley Quinn season 3 was provided during the announcement, but with only a five-month gap between season 1’s February 2020 release and season 2 this past June, it’s possible the show may be right around the corner.
