Tom Hardy drama ‘Taboo’ receives positive season two update

Taboo producer Dean Baker has confirmed that work has officially begun on a second season of the Tom Hardy-led drama.

The 2017 BBC series, which was co-created by Hardy, his father Chips Hardy and Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight, was originally renewed four years ago – though updates have been few and far between since.

Speaking to The Radio Times, Baker has now confirmed that his team have officially started work on the second season, and are hopeful it will arrive on screens soon.

The producer also noted that he, Kate Crowe, Ridley Scott and Hardy are keen to work on further adaptations of Charles Dickens’ work, having recently developed a Great Expectations TV series, set to air on BBC One on March 26.

“Currently we are working on a second season of Taboo, and hopefully we will get to explore more Dickens [like Great Expectations] with Steve, Ridley and Tom,” Baker explained.

Set in 1814, Taboo centres on Hardy’s character James Keziah Delaney as he returns to London from a 12-year stint in Africa. Believed to be long dead, he returns home to inherit what is left of his father’s shipping empire and rebuild a life for himself.

Back in August 2021, Hardy shared his ideas for season two, telling Esquire: “The second season of Taboo is really, really important to me, and it’s taken a lot of thinking, because I really enjoyed the first one and I want to be really fulfilled by the second one.

“We’re still playing with ideas: you could go linear, a continuation of time, or we could drop prior to London, or we could quantum-leap through time! I don’t know whether to go orthodox – there’s a series of that already written – but I don’t know if that’s the right way to go.”

Hardy continued: “In my head I was thinking, ‘Let’s say they get to America, they get to Canada, fast-forward to 1968, the Tet Offensive, the Vietnam War, look at the CIA, the Viet Cong, the French in Saigon….

“Take the Delaney family tree out in the jungle, and recreate the same family dynamics that were happening in London but with new people, thinking about how history and corruption repeats itself. It’s still Taboo, it’s still period, but it’s the Sixties. There’s something fun about that.

“Or do we go back to the 1800s? The Napoleonic Wars? The American War of Independence?’ But nothing’s crossed my heart and mind and desk where I’ve gone ‘That’s it!’ so I’m hanging fire.”

In November 2021, Steven Knight revealed that the second season was mostly written, and that that production was primarily halted by Hardy’s busy schedule.

The post Tom Hardy drama ‘Taboo’ receives positive season two update appeared first on NME.