BBC One renews Taboo for Season 2
David Farnor | On 08, Mar 2017
The BBC has renewed Taboo for a second season.
The show, starring Tom Hardy, has been commissioned for another run, within a few weeks of Season 1 reaching its conclusion. Like the first season, Season 2 will span eight episodes, according to Variety, with the BBC and US broadcaster FX once again teaming up to co-produce the programme.
The show, which is created by Steven “Peaky Blinders” Knight, is set in 1814 and sees Hardy play James Delaney, who reappears in London after 10 years in Africa to claim a mysterious legacy left to him by his father.
Set to inherit what’s left of his father’s shipping empire, James’ arrival not only threatens to disrupt the plans of his half‐sister Zilpha and her husband Thorne, but also the political ambitions of the mighty East India Company, chaired by Sir Stuart Strange.
More Tom Hardy. More top hats. More Taboo.
Just announced: #BBCTaboo will be returning to @BBCOne for a second series. pic.twitter.com/QlyuYLCuLk— BBC One (@BBCOne) March 8, 2017
“Devised by Tom and his father, the brilliantly-named “Chips” Hardy, the eight-part drama follows the tussle between James and the East India Company over his inheritance. But wait, there’s more beneath the surface of this extremely intriguing period piece. And the surface is already very grimy, full of swearing, violence, talk of testicles and Tom Hardy looking like death warmed up,” we wrote in our review of the show. “While the dialogue might be a tad clunky and the plot hard to fathom, there’s so much pleasure to be had in watching Tom Hardy being, well, Tom Hardy that there’s no point in complaining. Nobody wears a hat quite like Tom Hardy – and this is basically several hours of Tom Hardy wearing a hat and staring angrily at people.”
Executive produced by Hardy alongside Ridley Scott and Knight, Taboo is produced by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free London and Tom Hardy’s Hardy Son & Baker, with Sonar Entertainment distributing worldwide outside the UK.
The show has proven one of the BBC’s big hits of 2017, with over 3m requests on BBC iPlayer for its first episode, on top of consolidated viewing figures of 7m. As a result, the show has been launched as one of BBC iPlayer’s first drama box sets of the year, with the whole series available to watch until 27th March.
BBC iPlayer is expanding its box set library
14th February 2017
BBC iPlayer is expanding its library of TV box sets.
Box sets, once the term used to describe a set of DVDs that would literally be in a box, has been adopted by the online world, with Sky, in particular, emphasising the number of complete seasons it has available to stream. With binge-watching on the up, the words “box set” may be changing their meaning, but they’ve never been more relevant.
Now, the BBC is looking to boost its own line-up of box sets available on-demand. BBC iPlayer has done box sets before, with the all-at-once release of shows such as Peter Kay’s Car Share and The Living and the Dead. BBC Three, meanwhile, is a veritable hub of box sets, with each new show available on BBC iPlayer for months after its first release and older titles also returning in their entirety. With Thirteen being one of iPlayer’s most popular titles in 2016, the Beeb is now banking on box sets to help it compete with on-demand rivals such as Netflix.
And so the BBC Three approach is being applied to BBC One, with two of the channel’s most-watched dramas of 2017 so far becoming the latest in a wave of new box sets: Tom Hardy’s Taboo and psychological thriller Apple Tree Yard.
Taboo is already a hit online, receiving over 3m requests on BBC iPlayer for its first episode, on top of consolidated viewing figures of 7m.
In Taboo, Hardy plays James Delaney, who reappears in London in 1814 a changed and haunted man, having been presumed dead in Africa many years before. The show is executive produced by Hardy alongside Ridley Scott and Steven Knight, who created the drama.
Apple Tree Yard is an adaptation of Louise Doughty’s best-selling novel, and stars Emily Watson as a high-flying geneticist whose affair with a mysterious man is thrown into a new light by a sudden, shocking act of violence. It received 2m requests on iPlayer for its first episode alone, on top of its consolidated viewing figures of 7m.
All episodes of each show will remain on iPlayer until the last episode is broadcast. The full series will then be available to watch as a box set for 30 days.
The move follows BBC Director-General Tony Hall’s call last month for iPlayer to be reinvented to ensure it is the UK’s number one online TV service.
Dan Taylor-Watt, Head of BBC iPlayer, says: “Taboo and Apple Tree Yard have both been huge hits on TV and on BBC iPlayer. Now viewers will be able to enjoy them as full box sets – and we want to do the same for more shows in the future. It’s giving viewers what they want – and it’s just the start of what we can do to ensure BBC iPlayer is the UK’s number one online TV service.”
More box sets will be coming to BBC iPlayer “in due course”.