First Kill

***First Kill*** is an American supernatural teen drama series created by Victoria Schwab that premiered on June 10, 2022 on Netflix. The series is based on Schwab's short story of the same name. In August 2022, the series was canceled after one season.

## Premise

Teenage vampire Juliette Fairmont, having celebrated her sixteenth birthday, needs to make her first kill in order to enter adulthood and take her place among her powerful family of Legacy vampires, matrilineal direct descendants of Lilith who chose to be bitten by the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Juliette has difficulty choosing someone to feed on and struggles with her growing blood lust as she believes draining humans is wrong. She instead sets her sights romantically on the new girl Calliope Burns. Calliope, who belongs to a monster-hunting family from The Guardian Guild, needs to slay her first monster in order to gain her family's approval and officially become a Hunter herself. As both families become unavoidably involved, and Juliette and Calliope's relationship develops, the girls realise that killing each other is not so simple.

## Reception

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 58% approval rating with an average rating of 5.8/10, based on 21 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "First Kill breathes new life into the lesbian vampire genre, while shattering old tropes in the process" Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100 based on 8 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

In its first three days on Netflix, the show was watched globally for 30.34 million hours. After a month the show was watched upwards of over 100 million viewing hours peaking at number 3 in the Top 10 list for English speaking TV Shows.

The initial press listed the show among the 30 Best Vampire TV Shows as an "obsession-worthy supernatural YA drama". The focus of interviews was on the uniqueness of the diverse representation, but still showing the struggles that teenagers in high school go through inside their relationships with friends and family.

## Renewal Efforts

A month after cancellation by Netflix, fans around the world have continued efforts to get the series renewed or moved to a different streaming service. The social media outcry was taken by observers as proof that there is a popular market for LGBTQ+ TV shows with queer characters and their stories in the same style as '*Riverdale'*. First Kill resonated with some fans because it is a queer storyline with Black representation and is on a list of fan favourites that Netflix cancelled. The show has been compared on a must watch list to other fan favourite shows like Fate: The Winx Saga because the focus is on young girls with mystical capabilities. The show runner for First Kill has hope that the series will get renewed because of the efforts of the fandom that continues to promote the show months after its cancellation.  First Kill continued to get press three months after cancellation in magazines under the topic of tv shows that were gone too soon.  On August 3, #CancelNetflix began to trend on Twitter, as fans called out the streaming platform for its premature cancellation of the queer drama  following a history of cancellations of other WLW queer dramas on Netflix.

1. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First\_Kill\_(TV\_series)
2. ↑ https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/a40013319/netflix-new-series-first-kill/