Rachel Bloom had a pilot axed this week. She didn’t stay quiet about it.
ABC passed on “Do You Want Kids?”, the comedy Bloom co-created with her husband Dan Gregor — their first TV series collaboration since “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” wrapped in 2019. The show, co-starring Rory Scovel and directed by Trent O’Donnell, was built around a “Sliding Doors” structure: two timelines, one married couple, the roads taken and not taken toward parenthood. It was personal material. It was developed. It was done.
Bloom posted about it anyway:
“Since people — including myself — mostly use this place primarily to post about success, I want to give a shout out to my other buddy, Failure,” she wrote on Instagram. The post didn’t spin the cancellation or tease what’s next. It grieved specifically — the Upfronts trip she’d planned for May, the L.A. writing staff that was going to be hired, the August-through-October shoot that isn’t happening. She’d built out season arcs. Multiple of them.
“I mourn the project itself, but I also mourn the life I thought I was going to lead with the project becoming a reality,” she wrote. “We made a show about multiple timelines in the life of a couple, so it feels appropriate to mourn the timeline I thought I was gonna have this year with this show.”
That’s not just a graceful Instagram post. That’s a precise description of what development actually costs — not just money, but imaginative and emotional labor. Creators don’t pitch loglines. They pitch futures. They build the writers room in their head before the ink is dry on anything.
Bloom has been here before. She’s clear about that. “Over the past 6 years, I’ve mourned multiple failures, multiple timelines,” she wrote. “But I never mourn the work.”
That last line is doing real work. It’s the distinction that separates creators who survive the development cycle from those who get ground down by it, the ability to detach the effort from the outcome, to keep believing in what you made even when the network doesn’t. It’s also a statement of craft that the industry doesn’t reward publicly but quietly respects deeply.
The business reality underneath this is worth naming. Bloom is a Golden Globe winner with a cult-beloved series, a Netflix special, and a supporting role in “Reboot” — one of the sharper industry satires of recent years. She is not LGBTQ, but she has built queer characters and queer-specific storytelling into her work — most visibly in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which gave audiences one of television’s more honest portrayals of bisexual identity. She is not a struggling unknown hoping for a break. She is exactly the kind of proven talent broadcast networks claim to want. And ABC still passed.
That’s not an indictment of ABC specifically; pilots die everywhere, for reasons ranging from the legitimate to the inexplicable. But it is a reminder that the development system chews through creative labor indiscriminately. The more personal the project, the more expensive the loss.
“Do You Want Kids?” is a particularly pointed title to lose in this cultural moment. A comedy built around the genuine complexity of the children-or-no-children question — examined across parallel timelines, rooted in a real marriage — is exactly the kind of adult, specific, non-IP-driven content that critics keep eulogizing and networks keep failing to protect through pilot season.
Bloom is next seen in “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, now in theaters. A sequel to a franchise. The irony writes itself, and she’s probably already written the joke.
What she did this week — naming the failure out loud, refusing the usual PR silence, giving the grief its proper shape- is its own kind of power move. The industry runs on the performance of momentum. Bloom interrupted it. That’s worth something.
