Prime Video’s I Know What You Did Last Summer told a complete story in its first season — which is good, because Amazon decided against ordering more. That doesn’t mean there were no plans for future seasons, of course. When you’re tackling a popular intellectual property like that, you have to come up with a comprehensive pitch, so that if the show turns out to be hugely popular, you have more to do. Luckily for showrunner Sara Goodman, there was a lot to work with, from the original young adult novel by Lois Duncan to the 1997 film adaptation and its follow-ups, which leaned harder into the slasher genre than the book did.
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As a fan of both, Goodman said in a recent interview that she used influences from both to advance a larger vision for the series, and that the cult in the series would play a bigger role in future season. The series centered on five teens — Margot, Alison, Dylan, Riley, and Johnny — and ended with Margot and Alison framing Dylan for the murders of Dylan and Riley…but little do they know, the cult managed to save and/or revive Riley, setting the stage for more stories.
“I pitched an anthology series that all took place in this town in Hawaii, where everyone for generations previous and for generations future had done something wrong, and someone knew about it,” Goodman told Bloody Disgusting. “So it was kind of this generational trauma, and these generational lies and generational secrets….This place had its own kind of life from before. So in fact, I Know What You Did Last Summer Season 2 was originally pitched as [Alison’s father] Bruce and [cultist] Clara, and the cult, and what they had done. It was using the night in the cave, where Clara told Dylan everything, as a way of getting back into that world, so that we could have also had some closure about what really happened there.”
“So that was the original pitch. It was really this kind of anthology about the town,” Goodman added. “I will say that as this the show got written and shot, everyone really didn’t want to completely lose the characters of this first season. So as we were shooting…I was having to pitch future seasons and the finale and make changes, there were less purely anthological versions that were also being talked about…my idea was to use Season 2 to both introduce the cult and tell the rest of the Season 1 story. We could use Dylan to go back into what the cult was, and [reveal] that the cult leader was actually Dylan’s father.”
Apparently, the plan was to have basically all of the main characters suffer for their sins, leaving only Dylan (maybe joining the cult) and Riley (who would get her final revenge on Margot) relatively unscathed by the events of the series.
You can see the first season of I Know What You Did Last Summer on Prime Video now.
