A Floating Powder Keg – Taboo Has Been Renewed For A Second Season
by Staff
BBC One and FX have renewed the series Taboo for a second season, according to Entertainment Weekly. The series created by Steven Knight, Tom Hardy, and Chips Hardy reached its finale about a week ago on FX, a few days sooner for British audiences, and in the lead up to the finale, interviews with the showrunners confirmed that two more seasons were already planned if they got the go-ahead to continue. Ridley Scott is the show’s Executive Producer, who describes it as a “dark, dirty brute of a drama”.
The finale was a spectacle that provoked plenty of conversation, with continuous-shot fight scenes, shocking twists, and clockwork-like machinations falling into place for central character James Delaney attempting to outwit both the British Crown and his nemesis, The East India Company in this period-set series that’s reputedly about how British outsiders become Americans.
Without giving too much away about the finale, in case you haven’t seen it yet, it does end hopefully but ambiguously for our cast, with some hovering between life and death but a distinctive trajectory for the next season of the show. And now we’ll see what that trajectory will be.
The tone of the show has been intentionally over-the-top in terms of moody, foreboding aesthetics, casting Tom Hardy’s role as a big bad in the midst of pretty big and bad forces, but like excess in horror films, it always obeyed its own logic and some of the deep resonance of the show arises from the fact that it speaks in archetypes and symbols as much as in the grimy surface detail of 19th century life.
If you haven’t seen the series yet, it’s time to give it a shot and get ready for life on the high seas. On a ship full of volatile gunpowder. Oh, right, there’s that too.