Today’s good-bad news is basic: “Back to Life” will be back to life, for a second season.
Showtime made the announcement today (Tuesday), ahead of the superb first-season finale, at 10 and .10:30 p.m. Sunday (Nov. 24).
That’s good news, of course. The show is beautifully written, acted and filmed.
Still … one of the things I had praised about it was its brevity.
American shows feel compelled to turn out 22 episodes a year, for endless years. That requires them to run in place a lot … or to pile absurd switches on top of each other, in the soapy “Empire” style.
British shows – in a habit sometimes copied by American cable and streaming – stick only to the length needed. For “Back to Life,” that was six half-hours on three Sundays.
It started with Miri (Daisy Haggard, shown here, the show’s creator and producer) returning to her seaside village, after 18 years in prison for murder. Even her parents were afraid of her.
And it ends (with the 10:30 p.m. episode Sunday), with a wild town hall meeting. Secrets are revealed; we finally learn what really happened. A terrific little series ends … except, now we know it doesn’t.