When Does The Storyteller Season 2 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is The Storyteller about?

John Hurt sits by a fire with a dog who mutters complaints, and for nine episodes he tells you stories that feel like they've been waiting in the dark for centuries. This is The Storyteller, Jim Henson's attempt to make television for children that doesn't condescend to them, doesn't soften the edges of old tales, and trusts that young viewers can handle genuine strangeness and moral ambiguity. If you grew up on sanitized fairy tales, these versions might catch you off guard. They're handmade, practical, filmed with a deliberateness that makes every shadow matter.

What makes it work is restraint. The dog—played with acidic deadpan by a puppet—exists partly to voice skepticism about the stories being told, which sounds like it might undercut the material but instead anchors it. When Hurt's Storyteller begins a tale, the frame pulls us into worlds made from sets and craftsmanship rather than computers, which gives them weight. The stories themselves assume the audience understands that folklore can be dark, that characters make terrible choices, that consequences matter. There's no laugh track. There's barely any music. What you're left with is pure narrative.

The show aired for barely two months before disappearing, which feels almost appropriate for something this deliberately old-fashioned and uncommercial. Critics and audiences who found it loved it intensely, and it maintains a reputation among people who remember it as something genuinely special, though the small viewership and quick cancellation meant it never became a cultural fixture. It's the kind of thing Henson made that feels like it existed in the margins, too strange for mainstream television but too good to be forgotten entirely by the people it reached.

There's almost nothing like it now. Prestige television for children has grown more common, and folklore adaptations are everywhere, but The Storyteller's commitment to austere storytelling, to letting old tales breathe without explanation or modern irony, marks it as a period piece in the best sense. You can watch an episode and feel like you're sitting in front of someone who actually knows these stories, not someone performing them for camera.

Created by Jim Henson

Is The Storyteller renewed or cancelled?

Why did The Storyteller end?

The Storyteller arrived on NBC in May 1988 with considerable promise. The show, created by Anthony Minghella, had a strong premise and impressive execution that earned it an 8.8 rating on IMDb. Yet despite critical appeal, it lasted only nine episodes across a single summer run before disappearing from the schedule. The network simply did not see the audience size it needed to justify continuing the series.

Summer television in the 1980s was a different beast than prime time, and The Storyteller found itself in a slot where it could not build the viewership NBC wanted. The show ran from May through July, a short window that made it difficult to find and hold an audience, especially for a show that required attention and investment in its storytelling. Without the momentum of a full fall season to establish itself or the chance to be discovered through word of mouth, the series ended after those nine episodes. It was not a failure of quality but of timing and television economics—a good show that arrived in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

The Storyteller Season 2 Release Date

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The Storyteller seasons

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