The TV show that got axed before Ron Howard could direct it: “I was a little disappointed”
As a filmmaker who’s spent their entire career dipping their toes into as many different temperatures of directorial water as possible, it boggles the mind that Ron Howard has never helmed so much as a single episode of a narrative TV series. He wanted to, but the axe fell before he was given the chance.
Behind the camera, there’s almost nothing he hasn’t done. On the big screen, the two-time Academy Award winner has dived headfirst into drama, biopics, thrillers, literary adaptations, fantasy, comedy, and sci-fi, with superheroes and horror the only two major boxes that remained un-ticked in the half-century since he made his feature-length bow on Roger Corman’s Grand Theft Auto.
Howard has also directed several documentaries on subjects as diverse as Luciano Pavarotti, The Beatles, Jay-Z, and Muppets creator Jim Henson, and he also took the reins on several made-for-TV movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which saw him get a slap on the ass and the seal of approval from the legendary Bette Davis, so there isn’t much ground he hasn’t covered.
He had no interest in directing an episode of Happy Days, which was fair enough, but episodic storytelling has completely escaped him, apart from when he oversaw the pilot episode of Genius, the biographical anthology series that saw Geoffrey Rush playing Albert Einstein. Apart from that, he’s never been involved in a fictional show other than as an on-camera performer or executive producer.
Is Howard to blame for missing out on an opportunity that everyone from Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino had seized? Technically, yes, but Disney is equally complicit, after the company’s streaming service cancelled the sequel series to the director’s 1988 cult favourite fantasy flick, Willow, after a single eight-episode season.
Stephen Woolfenden, Debs Paterson, Philippa Lowthorpe, and Jamie Childs split the directorial duties on the big-budget continuation of the film, with Howard remaining keenly involved during development, casting, and production, which ensured his name was featured prominently in the credits as the brains behind the original movie and an executive producer of its episodic follow-up.
After the season finale aired in January 2023, Howard revealed that Willow was on his to-do list. “I was a little disappointed not to have time this time,” he informed Entertainment Weekly. “It would be a function of looking at the calendar. If we’re fortunate enough to carry on with the show, I am going to be as involved as I can be, as I was this season, because it means a lot to me.”
Evidently, Disney didn’t give a shit what Ron Howard wanted to do, because Willow was given the boot. Despite being one of the ten most-watched shows on streaming during its initial run, it was cancelled two months later, ripping the dream right out of his pale, freckled hands and casting it onto the pyre.
To add insult to injury, in May 2023, Willow was removed from Disney+ completely as part of a cost-cutting initiative, which meant that if he wanted to look back at the series he wanted to direct but couldn’t, he’d have to find it elsewhere.
