‘Ransom’ Renewed for Season 3 at CBS

CBS renewed Ransom for a third season Monday, continuing the network’s relationship with Canadian broadcaster Global.

Production on the new season will start as soon as October, reports Variety. CBS will continue to be the exclusive U.S. home of the series, which airs on Global in Canada.

Season three will run 13 episodes.

Ransom airs on Saturdays, which is usually a dead night for the broadcast networks. However, since it is an international production, Ransom provides the Eye Network with a cheap option for filling Saturday night timeslots usually reserved for repeats of its crime shows.

Luke Roberts stars in the series as Eric Beaumont, a crisis and hostage negotiator from Chicago. Nazneen Contractor, Brandon Jay McLaren, Sarah Greene, Karen LeBland, Emma de Caunes and Carlo Rota round out the rest of the cast. Each episode finds Eric solving a kidnapping or ransom case.

“The conflict of our show is that every episode we shoot to make it look like different locales, so we’re about to shoot one scene that takes place in Canada, we shot in one to make it look like Berlin, we shot a stand-in for Paris, we’ve shot to make it look like the Netherlands, and Amsterdam is pretty specific, and in the first season we shot in Nice, France and Toronto, and we made it look like countries all over the world, in Europe and North America,” Contractor told BriefTake about making Budapest look like different cities. “I mean that works for our show.”

The series was created by David Vanilova and is made in a partnership by Global, CBS, Germany’s RTL and France’s TF1. The second season was shot in Toronto and Budapest and aired from April to June, although most episodes of the show do not take place in Budapest.

“We are really excited to see Ransom enter a third season going from strength to strength,” Spotnitz said in a statement to TV By The Numbers. “This show is a true international creative collaboration. We are blessed with a talented cast and honored to have a growing and faithful audience.”

The second season averaged 2.45 million viewers and a 0.3 18-49 rating across 13 episodes. The last two episodes of the season aired back-to-back on June 30.

Photo Credit: Dávid Lukács/Ransom Television Productions Inc./CBS