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Sensitive Skin cancelled by HBO Canada

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Sensitive Skin will not return for a third season on HBO Canada. That’s the word from the show’s official Twitter account, which posted the news on Sunday morning.

Bell Media issued a statement to TV, Eh? on Monday afternoon:

“Several months ago, we informed the SENSITIVE SKIN team that we had made the decision not to renew the series for a third season. In our view, Davina’s journey came to a moving and elegant conclusion at the end of Season 2. We are very proud to have been part of this amazing show, which won over audiences and critics around the world. We remain huge fans of the creative team behind SENSITIVE SKIN and hope to work with them again in the future.”

Starring Kim Cattrall and directed by Don McKellar, Sensitive Skin garnered a 2015 International Emmy nomination in the Best Comedy Series category and Season 1 captured four Canadian Screen Awards, including the Bell Media Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Comedic Role (McKellar); Best Direction in a Comedy Program or Series (McKellar); Best Photography in a Comedy Program or Series (Douglas Koch) and Best Picture Editing in a Comedy or Variety Program or Series (Matthew Hannam).

Cattrall played Davina, a fiftysomething Toronto woman who was adjusting to her life as an older woman while married to her neurotic husband, Al (McKellar). Davina was worried she hadn’t done anything of note with her life and set out to change that. In Season 2, Davina was coping with life as a widow and moved to the Toronto Islands and attempted to make new friends. Sensitive Skin co-starred Nicolas Wright, Bob Martin, Colm Feore, Joanna Gleason, Clé Bennett, Elliott Gould and Marc-André Grondin.

Season 1 of Sensitive Skin was written by Bob Martin; Susan Coyne, Rosa Labordé and Lynne Coady wrote Season 2.

Fans were not happy to hear the news and took to Twitter to vent their frustrations.

Consider us in that group too.

How do you feel about Sensitive Skin being cancelled? Let me know in the comments section below.

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Featured, Sensitive Skin

Sensitive Skin returns for more quiet reflection in Season 2

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I’m so used to watching series featuring gals dispatching biker demons, Second World War spies, vikings attacking Paris and serial killers slaughtering small-town folk that Sensitive Skin made an immediate impact.

Returning Sunday on HBO Canada for Season 2, the Kim Cattrall-led drama doesn’t feature a gun owned by Wyatt Earp, Nazis or longboat battles. It’s a slow, spare character analysis of a woman trying to find her place in the world. The first season ended with Davina Jackson (Cattrall) at a crossroads in her life. Unhappy in her life and marriage to Al (Don McKellar), things were shaken up when Al suffered a heart attack and then flatlined in the season’s closing moments.

Now, picking up after that incident, Davina is moving on. But how? Would finding a new place make her happy? Would living with sister Veronica (Joanna Gleason) and brother-in-law Roger (Colm Feore) fill a hole in her life? She doesn’t know, though Theodore (Clé Bennett) goes a long way to helping her come to a decision. And while Davina is certainly the focus of Sensitive Skin, I was constantly drawn to Theodore. Sure, he deals drugs outside of her condo building, but the guy definitely has some viewpoints on life and is dead-on about many of them. (“They’re building one of those bath bomb places across the street, so you’d have to be smelling that hippy shit all day. That ain’t no way to live, right?” is one of his sage statements.)

Several segments in Episode 1 are very much about words left unsaid. Rather than fill a scene with conversation, head writer Bob Martin’s scripts boast precious seconds slowed down and set to a simple horn and strings as Davina quietly contemplates her next life move. She caresses a kitchen counter here, stares out a ceiling to floor window there; you can see the internal discussion going on in Davina’s head without her having to say the words aloud. It sets Sensitive Skin apart from other series, and I like that. A lot.

Sensitive Skin airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. ET/MT on HBO Canada.

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