Netflix canceled The Order in November 2020, five months after its second season went up. The show never got a third. What it left behind is 20 episodes across two seasons, a 10.0/10 critical score, and one of the stranger swings the streamer took at genre drama in the late 2010s.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Jack Morton and the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose
The Order premiered on March 7, 2019. It follows Jack Morton, a college student out to avenge his mother’s death. He pledges a secret society — the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose — and lands in a war between werewolves and practitioners of dark magic.
That’s the premise, and it’s a good one. The show knows it. Jack goes deeper into the order’s history and uncovers dark family secrets and an underground battle between werewolves and the magical dark arts. The college setting gives the magic a mundane frame. The order is a campus club before it is anything else.
Dennis Heaton created the series. The writing room included Heaton, Shelley Eriksen, Rachel Langer, Jennica Harper, Penny Gummerson, and Jason Filiatrault. That’s a deep bench for a show that only got 20 episodes to prove itself.
Jake Manley and Sarah Grey Carry the Cast
Jake Manley plays Jack Morton. Sarah Grey plays Alyssa Drake. Both were confirmed as series regulars alongside the initial announcement, along with Matt Frewer, Sam Trammell, and Max Martini. Katharine Isabelle also stars.
Manley has to hold the center. Jack is the audience’s way into the order, and the show leans on him hard. Grey’s Alyssa gives the story a second point of gravity. The two of them do the work that keeps a genre show from floating off into its own mythology.
The supporting cast matters here. Frewer, Trammell, Martini, and Isabelle give the order a face and a history. A secret society only works if the people running it feel like they have been running it for a long time. This cast sells that.
Two Seasons, 20 Episodes, One Cancellation
Netflix renewed The Order for a 10-episode second season in March 2019. That season released on June 18, 2020. In November 2020, the series was canceled after two seasons.
That’s the whole run:
- Season 1 premiered March 7, 2019
- Season 2 released June 18, 2020
- 20 episodes total across two seasons
- Canceled November 2020
The gap between the second season and the cancellation was short. Netflix didn’t give the show time to find a third act. That’s the pattern for a lot of streaming genre shows, and it’s worth naming here because it shapes how the two seasons read now.
A War Between Werewolves and Dark Magic
The genre tags are Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi & Fantasy. That combination is doing a lot of work — it has to be a campus drama, a mystery, and a supernatural war story at once, and it mostly holds.
The werewolf-versus-magic-war premise could have been a gimmick. It isn’t. The show treats the order as an institution with rules, rituals, and a hierarchy. Magic in The Order is taught. It is practiced. It has a structure.
That’s the smartest choice the series makes. Dark magic here isn’t a mood. It’s a discipline, and the show is interested in what happens when a student gets access to it.
What the 10.0/10 Score Says
The published critical score is 10.0/10, with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That’s a perfect score, and it’s the number this review matches.
A perfect score for a show that ran 20 episodes and got canceled is a strange thing to sit with. It says the people who watched it, watched it closely. It says the show did what it set out to do.
It does not say the show was a hit. Those are different claims, and the score doesn’t make the second one. A 10.0/10 and a cancellation notice can both be accurate at once, and for The Order they are.
Why the Cancellation Still Stings
The Order ended with more story to tell. Two seasons is enough to build a world and not enough to live in it. The show set up a war between werewolves and practitioners of dark magic and then stopped.
The second season arrived in June 2020. By November 2020, it was over. That’s five months. Whatever momentum the show had, Netflix didn’t wait to see where it went.
This is the part worth watching, even now. A 10.0/10 score and a cancellation in the same year is the clearest picture you get of how streaming treated genre television in that era. The show was good. The show was finished. Both were true at once.
The Case for Watching It Anyway
The Order is 20 episodes. That’s a weekend, not a commitment. The premise lands fast, the cast is solid, and the werewolf-versus-magic war gives the show a clear spine.
Jack Morton’s search for what happened to his mother drives the whole thing. That’s a clean engine for a mystery, and the show uses it. The order’s history is the puzzle. Jack’s family is the key.
The show never got to finish its own story. That’s a real cost, and it’s worth saying plainly. But what’s on Netflix is complete enough to stand. Two seasons, 20 episodes, a beginning, a middle, and an ending that arrived too soon.
The Order scores 10.0/10. That’s the published critical score, and it’s the right one. The show earned it in the time it had.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.