JoAnna Garcia Swisher Breaks Silence

JoAnna Garcia Swisher has bittersweet feelings about the end of Sweet Magnolias following the Netflix drama’s cancellation this week.

“How do you say goodbye to something that became so much more than a job?” Garcia Swisher wrote on Instagram on Sunday, September 20, as she shared a slideshow of promotional photos and behind-the-scenes snapshots from the series. “Seven years. Five seasons. A million tiny moments that somehow became a whole life. Sweet Magnolias came into my world during a chapter that held some of my deepest loss and, somehow, some of my greatest joy.”

Based on books by Sherryl Woods and adapted for TV by Sheryl J. Anderson, Sweet Magnolias followed three longtime best friends in the town of Serenity, South Carolina — Maddie Townsend (Garcia Swisher), Dana Sue Sullivan (Brooke Elliott), and Helen Decatur (Heather Headley) — as they “shepherd each other through the complexities of romance, career, and family,” Netflix said in the show’s logline.

Courtesy of Netflix

And as Garcia Swisher explained on Instagram, her Sweet Magnolias family helped to make up for losses in her real-life family. “I lost both of my parents during those early seasons, and in a time when I wasn’t always sure how to keep moving forward, Serenity gave me somewhere to go,” she wrote. “These people gave me somewhere to belong. They made me laugh when I was sure I had forgotten how. They let me be sad when I needed to be. They showed up. Again and again and again. And maybe that’s what I will carry with me most.”

She went on: “This show was always about showing up for the people you love. About friends becoming family. About life not turning out exactly the way you planned, and choosing to build something beautiful anyway. Somewhere along the way, while we were telling those stories, we started living them, too.”

To “every single person who made this show, and every single person who watched it, loved it, shared it, and found a little piece of themselves in Serenity,” Garcia Swisher gave her thanks. “You will never fully know what you gave me. Five seasons. Seven years. One really, really beautiful chapter of my life. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to close it. But I am so incredibly grateful I got to live it. Thank you, Serenity. Pour it out.”

Despite Sweet Magnolias’ demise, Netflix isn’t letting Garcia Swisher or Anderson go. Garcia Swisher will star in the upcoming Netflix drama series Ladies of the House, which Anderson is adapting from Lauren Edmondson’s novel of the same name.