PRODIGAL SON Bosses on the Unique Challenges of Crafting Season 2

PRODIGAL SON ended its first season with a pitch-perfect, full-circle moment, as reporter Ainsley (Halston Sage) killed Nicholas (Dermot Mulroney)—much to the horror of her NYPD profiler brother, Malcolm (Tom Payne), and the utter delight of their father/notorious serial killer, Dr. Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen).

The move had been something showrunners Chris Fedak and Sam Sklaver had been planning from the initial series pitch. And while their season 1 was truncated due to COVID, they shot the final two episodes of the season out of order, allowing them to end the year where they wanted to.

When it came time to prep the second season, however, the writers were facing a different world than they had ever told their show in.

“I remember Chris and I talking around the end of March/beginning of April, and it was like, ‘Should we shoot the show in Australia?’” Sklaver recalls. “‘Can we shoot an entire season in the Claremont set?’ And then when we started to kind of get our feet underneath us, God bless all the unions and the studio for getting everything together safely with our testing protocol.”

“In regards to the big overarching scope of the show, we’re still very much telling the same story that we intended to tell at the end of season 1,” Fedak adds. “That being said, everything had to change. We had a pandemic, we had Black Lives Matter, we had all these incredible story-changing events—as well as production-changing events—that we had to tap into and had to figure out for the show. And we also had to figure out how to make a show during a pandemic. There was a lot of figuring out what we can and can’t do. But we’re very excited in the season that we’re making, [which] very much [has the] scope and the scale of what we were able to do in season 1.”

One of the biggest changes? “We don’t have as many extra in scenes, we don’t have any scenes with 100 people running around like we did last year,” Sklaver says. “But besides that, we’ve been able to tell the same show that we wanted to tell. It’s just a testament to our crew and a little bit of luck, I guess.”

A little less lucky are the characters, specifically Malcolm, who is trying to adjust after taking drastic steps to save his sister.

“We wanted to do a couple things like in the season premiere, [including] tell the audience what happened next [after the first season concluded],” Fedak teases. “We weren’t going to hide the ball for a whole bunch of episodes and then reveal [what] Malcolm had [done in the aftermath]. But we wanted to do that in such a way that would free us up to also have Malcolm sitting and standing on a ledge, looking out over the city and having caught the bad guy in the first few minutes of the episode. We wanted to be able to do everything.”

PRODIGAL SON, Season Premiere, Tuesday, January 12, 9/8c, Fox

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