The debut season of Stephen King‘s The Outsider on HBO has yet to conclude and, despite a follow-up season yet to officially be announced, showrunner Richard Price confirms that he’s already begun toying with what a sophomore season could explore. The series has been promoted more as a limited series event, adapting the King novel of the same name, but HBO has never shied away from delivering audiences the continued adventures of a seemingly limited storyline, as the success of Big Little Lies in 2017 resulted in the series getting a second season, inspired by a novella crafted by original author Liane Moriarty.
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“It’s like pulling a rabbit out of a glass hat — of course there will be another [if HBO wants one],” Price revealed last month to IndieWire, while also confirming he was working on the subsequent season. “There’s no such thing as a series that, if it does well, they’re not going to want a second season.”
Despite these comments from Price, he previously delivered audiences the limited series The Night Of in 2016, which was also a success and has not earned a second season. The major difference between the two series being that, thanks to The Outsider featuring a number of seemingly supernaturals events, the mythology could be explored in all-new ways with a new season, whereas The Night Of focused solely on one character’s wrongful conviction.
This 10-episode series follows police detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn), as he sets out to investigate the mutilated body of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson found in the Georgia woods. The mysterious circumstances surrounding this horrifying crime leads Ralph, still grieving the recent death of his own son, to bring in unorthodox private investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), whose uncanny abilities he hopes will help explain the unexplainable.
One of the joys of King’s works is that they feature subtle connections to one another, whether it be an event or a location, while The Outsider‘s Holly Gibney has also appeared in King’s trilogy of books about Bill Hodges. This lack of connections offers both challenges and opportunities.
“You assume no one knows anything; that this miniseries is its own thing,” Price pointed out. “There’s no reference to Mr. Mercedes. There’s no reference to Holly previously. There’s no reference to Stephen King, although that’s [going to be known]. It’s just a story and you just write it. The worst thing in the world is to write something assuming people know something that, in fact, they don’t. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘I thought you read my other books, so you know where we are.’ It doesn’t work that way.”
New episodes of The Outsider air Sunday nights on HBO.
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