If you’ve been enjoying Starz’s new drama series and wondering when or if Counterpart Season 2 would be happening, we’ve got some great news for you. The pay cable channel announced today that production has begun in Berlin on the second season of the J.K. Simmons-fronted dramatic sci-fi show, so yes, another season of Counterpart is coming. Additionally, Get Out actress Betty Gabriel has joined the show as Naya Temple, a former FBI agent recently hired by the Office of Interchange to clean house, described as “a figure both intimidating and magnetic.”
The new series hails from creator/showrunner Justin Marks, who scripted Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book. The sci-fi thriller takes place in Berlin and follows a man named Howard Silk (Simmons, delivering a phenomenal performance), a lowly cog in the bureaucracy of a secretive Berlin-based UN spy agency. But he discovers in the show’s first episode that his workplace harbors a secret: 30 years ago, a rip opened up revealing a parallel dimension. The only mode of travel between the two dimensions is underneath his building, and the existence of this second dimension is the world’s best kept secret.
As the show has progressed we’ve gotten to meet Howard’s “counterpart” from the other side, who carries himself in a far different manner, and whose life these past 30 years has gone in a very different direction. The show gets better and better each week as Marks and his writing team use this intriguing sci-fi premise as a jumping off point not for comedy or hard sci-fi, but for a character-rich drama. The show is a spy thriller to be sure, but more in the vein of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than something like Bourne—although there are fantastic action flourishes here and there.
MRC serves as the studio on the series, and while filming is now underway on the 10-episode Counterpart Season 2 in Berlin, the show will continue production in Los Angeles later this year. One imagines the Berlin filming is to capture all the exteriors for Season 2, while the indoor work will be shot mostly in L.A. Indeed, the series is not just great on a story and character level, it’s also incredibly cinematic.
I’m delighted that a second season is on the way as this has quickly become appointment viewing for me. If you haven’t checked Counterpart out just yet, I highly suggest you do so. No Season 2 premiere date has been announced yet.
via Collider