Nurse Ratched has flown the coop. Sarah Paulson, who was Golden Globe Award-nominated for her role as Mildred Ratched in Netflix’s prequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, confirmed there will be no Ratched season 2. Netflix originally ordered two seasons of the Nurse Ratched origin story in 2017 after outbidding rival streamers Apple and Hulu for the psychological drama created by Evan Romansky and developed by executive producer Ryan Murphy, who signed an overall deal with Netflix in 2018.
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“No,” Paulson answered in response to a fan asking if there will be a Ratched season 2 in the video below.
Ratched debuted in 2020 as Netflix’s biggest original first season of the year. According to the streamer, 48 million subscribers streamed Ratched in its first 28 days of availability on the service. The eight-episode series — which also stars Finn Wittrock, Judy Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Jon Briones, Charlie Carver, Corey Stoll, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Sharon Stone — is set in 1947 and follows Mildred Ratched as she begins working as a nurse at a psychiatric hospital, where a growing darkness lurks beneath Ratched’s stylish exterior.
Paulson previously expected to reprise her role in a second season and that Murphy planned to bring Ratched into the 1970s and the era of Cuckoo’s Nest, but remarked there may be a long wait for season 2.
“At this point we shot Ratched a little over a year ago,” she told TheWrap in 2020.”But the good news about Netflix – I like to think about it like TheCrown, just because I’m a desperate fan of The Crown and the amountof time I have to wait for another season always makes me so f—ingcrazy. But then when it comes I’m just like a raved nut just sittingthere and I devour it. And I get so excited when I start to see theposters and I know that it’s soon and it’s always usually aroundChristmastime and it’s like a present to me. So I like to put us intothat timeframe in my mind that if people consume it the way I hope theydo, they will anxiously be waiting for the next installment when it doescome. And it’ll make it that much sweeter.”
Paulson also expected to bring Nurse Ratched “further and further away from her heart and her humanity” in a potential second season exploring how she became the nightmare nurse in Cuckoo’s Nest.
“But I don’t know that we would ever go into the hospital, simplybecause — and this is me saying this, I don’t know what Ryan’s planwould be — I certainly don’t want to see me acting opposite acomputer-generated Jack Nicholson,” she told TheWrap. “I mean, I don’tthink that sounds like a good idea. So I think if we end up in thatera, it would be more about what Nurse Ratched’s life was when sheturned the key in her white uniform, coming back into her house fromthose days at the hospital with all those events that happened there.”
