Taboo producer Dean Baker has confirmed that work has officially begun on the second season of the drama with Tom Hardy.
The 2017 BBC series, co-created by Hardy, his father Chips Hardy and Peaky Blinders screenwriter Stephen Knight, was originally renewed four years ago, although there have been few updates since.
In an interview with The Radio Times, Baker confirmed that his team has officially started work on the second season and hopes that it will appear on screens soon.
The producer also noted that he, Kate Crowe, Ridley Scott and Hardy are keen to work on further adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens, having recently developed the series “Great Expectations”, which will air on BBC One on March 26.
“We are currently working on the second season of Taboo, and hopefully we will be able to learn more about Dickens [for example, Great Expectations] with Steve, Ridley and Tom,” Baker explained.
The action of “Taboo” takes place in 1814. The focus is on Hardy’s character James Kezia Delaney, who returns to London after a 12-year stay in Africa. Presumed long dead, he returns home to inherit what remains of his father’s shipping empire and rebuild his own life.
Back in August 2021, Hardy shared his ideas about the second season, telling Esquire: “The second season of Taboo is very, very important to me, and I had to think a lot, because I really liked the first season, and I really want to be the second.
“We are still playing with ideas: you can move linearly, like a continuation of time, or we can fall to London, or we can make a quantum leap in time! I do not know whether to become Orthodox — it has already been written about this — but I do not know if this is the right way.”
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….
“Drag the Delaney family tree into the jungle and recreate the same family dynamics that took place in London, but with new people, thinking about how history and corruption repeat themselves. It’s still Taboo, it’s still an era, but it’s the sixties. There’s something funny about it.
“Or are we going back to the 1800s? The Napoleonic Wars? The American War of Independence?” But nothing came to my mind, to my head and to the table where I said: “That’s it!” so I’m hanging fire.”
In November 2021, Stephen Knight reported that the second season had mostly been written, and that production had been halted mainly due to Hardy’s busy schedule.
