Lennie James, best known as Morgan in The Walking Dead and now sister show Fear the Walking Dead, spent a chunk of his time away from killing zombies to write and star in his own series. Called Save Me, it tells the story of a father, Nelly (James), who is estranged from his daughter, Jody. One day, Jody goes missing and the finger of blame is pointed at him. In his desperate search for the 13-year-old, Nelly is drawn into a dark underworld right on his doorstep.
The James-penned series was so successful, a second season has been greenlit, with filming due to begin around August next year. Eager to find out more about the story, after Season 1 ends without a resolution to his search, FANDOM asked Lennie James himself what we can expect from Season 2 — including whether it can get any darker.
Ticking-Clock Scenario
“I’m not sure it’ll go even darker but it does go into a slightly different aspect of the story,” said James. “One of the things I wanted to do was explore the characters I’d established in a slightly different way; put them into a slightly different ticking-clock scenario, have them have different pressures on them. In the first season, we went into Tam’s [Jason Flemyng] house, we went into Zita’s [Camilla Beeput] house, we very much went into Melon [Stephen Graham] and Bernie’s [Alice May Feetham] life and the effect Nelly’s search for Jodie had on them, and I want to do that with a few other characters who were in the pub.
“There’s a time jump that we have to navigate, both by desire and circumstance. I want to pick up the story when most people have forgotten that Jody is missing, [when] the missing posters have been taken down in the main. Just for the basic premise of where we pick it up, there’s only two or three people who wake up every morning with the knowledge that Jody’s still missing and that’s Claire [Suranne Jones] and Barry [Barry Ward] and Nelly.”
A Different Thriller
While others may have forgotten Jody, Nelly most certainly hasn’t and he’ll be as dogged as ever in his hunt for his missing daughter.
“It’s no longer in the newspaper, the case has been moved to the Missing Persons Unit and there’s a whole different energy around them,” said James. “And Nelly is like a die-hard punk, he’s like the last person [clinging on to her memory]; any whisper of her anywhere, he’s on the train or blagging a ride or jumping the turnstiles in order to get her, just in case it might be her. So it’s a bit more fruitless for him — and then something major happens and he gets caught up in a slightly different thriller that both involves the search for Jody and slightly distracts him from the search for Jody, and [it explores] the consequences of that.”
As for Nelly’s yellow puffer jacket, which is already attaining cult status, fans can rest assured it’ll be back.
“I’m not sure what state [it will be in]…,” said James. “Well, I am sure. I think one of the characters in the second season says: ‘It’s only your bloody-mindedness that’s holding that jacket together’. And I think that’s pretty much where we pick him up, where literally the only thing holding him together is his bloody-mindedness.”
So if Season 2 of Save Me is filming this time next year, when can we expect to see it on screens?
James said: “I break from Fear between the end of June and the end of November so between those months next year we’ll be filming and as soon as we get it edited and put together, Sky will be putting it out [in the UK], so either the end of 2019 or early in 2020 is when we’ll be back.”
While there’s no word yet on a possible US air date, American fans can currently catch Save Me Season 1 on Starz.