BBC confirms long-awaited return news about its breakout hit crime drama
The BBC has officially renewed This City Is Ours for a second season.
The eight-part first season, which launched in full on BBC iPlayer in March and concludes its weekly run on BBC One tonight, has been a hit with both critics and audiences – boasting a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score and its first episode drawing the highest ratings for a new BBC drama this year.
In response to strong fan demand for more episodes, the BBC has listened and renewed This City Is Ours for a second season.
"We have all been blown away by the incredibly positive response to This City is Ours, I can't thank the audience enough for their time and emotional investment," said Stephen Butchard, the show's creator, lead writer and executive producer.
"My heartfelt thanks also to Lindsay Salt and her wonderful team at BBC Drama for their unflinching support and continued belief in the show, our story and our characters - and not least for this opportunity to do it all over again! See you soon!"
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Lindsay Salt, director of BBC Drama, added: "This City is Ours was one of our team's first commissions when I joined the BBC, and I could not be happier with how Stephen, [director Saul Dibb] and the Left Bank team have brought it to the screen so classily.
"The response from viewers has been a joy to see, with millions discovering its thrilling, character-driven drama for themselves to become gripped by the raging war of the Phelans.
"I'm delighted that we now get to build on this fantastic first run and show that things are only just getting started for this very special series."
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This City is Ours centres on the love affair between Michael (James Nelson-Joyce) and Diana (Hannah Onslow), which unfolds as Michael's crime empire begins to fall apart.
"For years, together with his friend Ronnie (Sean Bean), Michael has successfully been bringing cocaine into the City and beyond, using his close links with the Marbella underworld; but when a shipment goes missing, he knows their kingdom is under attack," the synopsis reads.
The series also stars Laura Aikman, Julie Graham, Kevin Harvey, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Mike Noble, Bobby Schofield, Darci Shaw, and Stephen Walters.
This City Is Ours airs on BBC One and streams on BBC iPlayer.
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He also discussed what guided their thinking about the new scenes between Joel and Ellie on her birthdays, his emotional reaction to seeing locations from the game created in real life — and what happened when O'Hara disagreed with his direction for the scene in which Gail slaps Joel. We wanted this episode for Ellie to find out definitively that Joel lied. In the game, we did in a very different way, where she traveled all the way back to the hospital and found documentation. It felt like we would be stretching the reality of the world and how dangerous it is on the show compared to the game. But also, looking at documents and exploring that space, I don't know if that makes as compelling of a drama for a TV show. The engine for the show is a little different than the engine for an interactive experience. So that ultimately led to the whole Eugene sequence. 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Here, it felt like there's an opportunity to show more of Ellie's evolution of becoming a teenager in Jackson, and for that misunderstanding to create more of a rift between them. But also show evolution, forgiveness, movement — you could feel how much Joel is trying. He gets things wrong. It's the first time he's [parenting] a teenager at this age, but he's trying to accommodate all the things that Ellie wants. She wants to move to the garage, and even though he doesn't want her to, he gives it to her. She gets this tattoo, and she does drugs, and it infuriates him. And then he's looking at her tattoo, and he says, This looks better than the one I've done on the guitar. He's trying. She wants to go on patrols, and eventually he yields on that. Almost everything she wants, he gives it to her, and it's never enough, because ultimately their friction is not about any one of those things. Well, I'm not sure when it was written. You'd have to ask Eddie Vedder that. However, it did come out to the public in 2013, and it is anachronistic in that it should not exist in our timeline. Initially, when we were making this episode, there would have been a different song. As we were exploring it, just felt like we were prioritizing the wrong thing, this timeline of events and when things would be available. Clearly, we're not in the same timeline as our universe, so we have some leeway. And that song felt so important. Because it was in the game, because it has so much association, not only for fans, but even for myself, we changed course. The thing that we thought we cared about, we ultimately didn't care about, and the emotional truth of the song was more important than the timeline truth of the world that we live in. No. When we were making the game, I knew that scene should exist. I didn't know where it goes. That was true for all the flashbacks. Even pretty late in production of the game, we were moving those flashbacks around. In talking about it with Craig, it's the first time I really thought about the time between seasons. So much of writing is set ups and payoffs, and we would have set certain things up that get paid off years later. That felt too long, especially because this season focuses so much on Ellie's journey and this emotional truth of what did she know? What didn't she know? To wait additional years until Season 3 will come out — or maybe even Season 4, it depends where all the events land and how many seasons we have — I was easily convinced by Craig that that would be too long. It was a day's worth of conversation of us wrestling with it. The way I work is, when a suggestion like that is made, I say, 'Let's play it through.' I just assume that it's correct, and then we play it through and not only talk about this season, but talk about the future seasons, and then say, does it make sense? If the answer is yes, we go with it. If the answer is no, we either keep wrestling with it until we find another solution, or we just go back to how it was in the game. [Long pause] That's right. We knew we had this Eugene mystery, and we had so many iterations on it of just what that sequence should be about. There were versions that had all this action and fighting and shooting infected, and much smaller versions. It went from me to Hallie to Craig, from me to Hallie to Craig. It just didn't feel right for a long time, until we landed on him lying to her about killing Eugene. and then everything just fell into place, as far as, like, Oh, this is how she'll know. It felt like such a dramatic way for her to figure things out. As far as shooting that scene, if no one knew the lie, what I like about that scene is he's being very considerate. Would you want to tell Gail that he wanted to see her, almost in this pitiful way, and I still had to put him down, because those are the rules, and that's the way to keep you safe? Sometimes you could buy the argument that the lie is better than the truth, right? But for Ellie, it wasn't, because of everything else that has come before, because she saw that he betrayed her trust. That meant more than just this moment, it meant that everything that Ellie was worried about, the survival guilt that she's felt all the way back to Season 1 of needing to justify Riley's death and Tessa's death and Henry and Sam and all these people who died along the way so that something good can come of it at the end. It's almost in that moment she realizes nothing good came out of it. That's not entirely true, but that's how she feels about it. So it was just important that all the actors knew the truth they're going into it, and for it to be genuinely shocking. If I may, I just want to sing Catherine O'Hara's praises. It was one of my favorite directing moments. In the scene, she slaps Joel, and then in his shame, he's supposed to take a few steps back. We were struggling with it. It just felt artificial. It felt rehearsed. Initially, there were no lines of dialogue for that little moment. I went to Catherine, and said, 'I think we need to do something else here. I don't know what. What if, like, his proximity to this body is somehow desecrating it now that you know the truth, and if you want, you could yell at him to get away?' And she's like, 'Oh, I'm not so sure. I like the beauty of there being no dialogue.' And I'm like, 'Please, just try it. If it doesn't work, we'll go back to the other version. But I always like experimenting, just shaking it up in some way.' So I asked her to yell to get away. I thought that would motivate Pedro [to step back]. Instead, she almost did the opposite. It was so beautiful. She goes inside [herself] and starts sobbing, and begs him to please get away in this very soft spoken voice. I'm like, Oh, my God, that's so much better than what I asked for. It's one of those beautiful moments of collaboration, where I asked for something, she internalized it, made it something else, and it's better because of it. That's the take you see in the episode. We didn't. Pretty early on, we talked about the tragedy of that. We had a conversation about Episode 1 where, like, 'Should there be a picture of the two of them in their home?' 'No, just the shoes.' That's the only sense you see, his shoes next to her shoes. Sometimes those are my favorite moments in storytelling, those gaps where we trust you as a viewer to fill in that relationship. You can picture them smoking weed together and doing all this stuff, but we felt like for this story, we didn't need to show. I haven't found the words to describe this feeling. It's so surreal. I can't even tell you why I get so emotional when I'm on these sets. The first time I walked on set, I was in Joel's house with Hallie, my co-writer on the game and was the other co-writer on the show on this episode as well. We're like, look at this dining room! This is where in the game, Maria talks to Ellie and Dina, and it looks exactly the same. Every set felt like that. This [museum] set in particular, the day we're shooting this, I had two visitors from Naughty Dog, Arne Meyer, who is our heads of communication, and Alison Mori, who is my partner in running the studio. They got to see a part that we end up cutting from the episode, more in the dinosaur museum. I'm like, come with me, and we walk through this dark hallway with stars, and we got to the space capsule, and I'm like, 'Look at this.' I'm emotional, but I've been seeing it as it's been built. I look at them, and they both have tears in their eyes. This thing that we worked so hard to perfect in digital forms with pixels on a flat screen, now you could stand in it, you could go into it, you could touch it. All the buttons are working. The seats are real. They creak when you sit in them. It felt like we went into the game. It's this really wonderful feeling to know that this incredible crew that I worked with treated the source material with such reverence. It literally moved us to tears. This interview has been edited and condensed. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
