Good Trouble: Freeform Showrunner on Filming New Scenes for the Cancelled Show’s Finale

(Photo: Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)

Good Trouble ended on Freeform last night with an extended series finale episode, but it was not initially filmed that way. The drama’s fifth season wrapped filming in June ahead of its cancellation in December.

The series stars Cierra Ramirez, Tommy Martinez, Emma Hunton, Sherry Cola, Zuri Adele, Josh Pence, Bryan Craig, and Booboo Stewart. It features characters first seen in The Fosters. The story follows Mariana (Ramirez) and others who live in a small apartment building in Los Angeles. Maia Mitchell, who departed at the end of season four, returned for the series’ final episode.

All involved with the Freeform series believed it would be picked up for a sixth season, but the industry strikes and cutbacks led to its cancellation.

Since production on Good Trouble had wrapped long before the drama was cancelled, the show wasn’t going to have any kind of closure.

Showrunner Joanna Johnson said the following about the series finale and how things changed after Freeform cancelled the show, per Deadline:

“We finished shooting Season 5 in June. We had delivered the series and the finale and everything really believing that we were going to get to Season 6, and I think that was the plan. Then the strikes were just incredibly bruising and then went very long. There’s a lot of financial pressures on the studios and the networks, and things just changed. And I heard in about October, I think, that our pickup wasn’t necessarily guaranteed…right before the holidays, Simran Sethi [EVP of Programming and Content Strategy, ABC Studios], who had been fighting so hard for us and deserves a huge shout out, she called me and very graciously said how sorry she was that they weren’t going to be able to produce any more episodes of Good Trouble.

We had some savings from Season 5, and I said, ‘Is there any way we could use that savings to shoot some more scenes so that we can…at least see a series finale and have a proper goodbye?’ She really went to bat for us, and they let us do it. She just said it could be as long [we] wanted it to be. It was wonderful. So then we had to just wait for Maia Mitchell to be available, because she was in a movie. We didn’t have much time to post, because it airs on Tuesday. So a couple weeks ago, we shot it for two days. I opened up the the finale that we had, and I cut some some stories that we were trying to boot and cliff on for Season 6, because it didn’t make any sense anymore. I wrote these new scenes so that we could have that last family Coterie dinner and the final scene on the roof. It was just lovely, because everybody got to come back together — our wonderful cast and our wonderful crew — and have those two days to properly say goodbye.”

What do you think? Have you kept up with the Good Trouble TV series? Were you sad to see it end? Did the finale give proper closure to this Freeform series?