
Source: Ken Jack / Getty
Season 2 of Chewing Gum premiered in 2017, and after initially saying that she wasn’t going to move forward with a Season 3, early last year, star and show creator Michaela Coel had a change of heart. But now, the star has decided to stick to her first thought, which is to call it a day when it comes to her hit show.
During an interview with Vulture to promote her BBC limited series Black Earth Rising, Coel was asked if she was going to add a third season of Chewing Gum to her very full list of things to do, and she emphatically, this time around, said no. In fact, she said telling people that “the party is over” is something she finds some enjoyment in now. Sis is ti-red.
“It’s so strange, I kind of relish in this news,” she said. “It’s like I love giving this bad news. I love telling people it’s over. The party is over. I don’t know why I love it so much because it’s not real, but look you’re still alive, right? It’s like, I get messages from people, they say they wanna kill themselves. ‘I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t do another season.’ You’re still here though, right? Look at that.”
People won’t let it go quietly, though. Coel said a fan reached out to her saying they wrote their own version of Season 3. She’s more than happy to pass the baton to someone else, even though they’d need to find a new Tracey, and no one would want that.
“Listen, I had a message from someone saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind, I’ve done a season three.’ I’m like, ‘Good. Do it,'” she said. “I’m not doing another season. Anybody else can do it. Please, anybody. I’m just not doing it. That’s all. Everybody has permission. I’m just not. For real. [Giggles.]”
So Coel is moving on. She starred in the musical Been So Long, has Black Earth Rising, and as she told Vulture, is currently writing her next project. But there’s nothing funny about it.
“I’m working on a show for BBC Two. It’s 12 episodes. I’ve done all of them though,” she said. “It’s about sexual consent, but it’s about trauma and grief and the seven stages of grief, and how we get to the final stage.”
While the news of a definite no to Chewing Gum Season 3 is a bummer for fans who were holding out hope that one last hurrah might pop up on Netflix sooner than later, it makes sense that she would want to move on from the show, which she wrote by herself. It required too much from her mentally, physically and emotionally.
“My sets are not peaceful,” she said to The London Times last year. “It’s a beautiful catastrophe. I am running around like a headless chicken. I don’t sleep because I am writing. It’s manic.”