David Farnor | On 10, Apr 2015

Sky has commissioned a second season of Fortitude.

The Arctic crime drama, part Broadchurch and part X-Files, premiered in January 2015 and was the first Sky original programme to premiere simultaneously across all Sky markets: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland.

The first episode was watched by a cumulative British audience of 2.66m and the series so far averages 1.69m viewers, making it Sky Atlantic’s most successful original commission, not just among regular customers but new ones too – half of the audience came to Sky Atlantic for the first time to watch it.

Writer Simon Donald will return on scripting duties with 10 more episodes set in the same, remote town. Fifty Fathom’s Patrick Spence and Frith Tiplady will also return as Executive Producers.

Donald comments: “It’s a privilege to return to Fortitude. It’s a place where the real and the feared live side by side, where old dark secrets thaw out into the chill light of the arctic day. I’d never been anywhere like Fortitude before and I can’t wait to go back”.

Fortitude launched in the US through Participant Media’s television network, Pivot, who are confirmed to return to co-produce the second season.

“From the first episode, audiences responded to the incredibly rich world Simon Donald created, where nature and civilization collide with catastrophic results,” says Kent Rees, General Manager of Pivot.

The announcement arrives as the first season draws to a typically horrifying conclusion. The cast for the new season will be announced at a later date, but we can expect to see some familiar faces, as Donald has confirmed that the show will continue on the story, picking up events seven weeks after the finale.

“The astonishingly fruitful world that’s available to us as a consequence of what we did in that little town from the first episode is a lot more interesting than going ‘reboot and start again’ – that’s a terrible idea!” he told the RadioTimes in a spoiler-filled interview.

“The fall-out from events like that – psychologically, emotionally, in terms of how the community copes, in terms of how people deal with what they had to do and what happened to them and their immediate family – is, dramatically, very, very rich, not something where you want to go ‘Ok, let’s start again with an invasion of killer, laser rabbits’.”

You can catch up with Season 1 of Fortitude for another 29 days on Sky On Demand and, for non-Sky customers, on NOW.

Photo: ©2015 Sky/Tiger Aspect Productions

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