It was a blink and you’d miss it kind of return to television but last night the second season of crime drama Baptiste finally aired on BBC One.
It’s been a long ol’ stint since the first season of the show – which is a spin-off of dark and gripping whodunnit The Missing – aired, back in early 2019. Like many TV productions, Baptiste was forced to shut down filming at the start of the pandemic, and shooting was postponed by a good six months.
Executive producer Chris Aird said that getting the second season just right was “the most logistically challenging thing”, after having to repeatedly rewrite the script to adapt to the changing global situation.
“We spent four months talking every single day, two or three times a day, trying to work out everything. Planning, re-planning, re-planning. We rewrote the scripts four times to deal with COVID, to deal with an actress who’s had a baby in November, who’s Hungarian but can’t come here. There was just endless Rubik Cube problems that kept coming our way.”
“Film production is complicated at the best of times and it was like having an 1000-piece jigsaw and then painting it black” he added.
Whilst the first season focused on Baptiste’s hunt to track down an enslaves sex worker in Amsterdam, the second season’s storyline focuses on the family of a British ambassador who go missing in Hungary.
The new season will feature Fiona Shaw, who is most recently recognised for her role as Carolyn in Killing Eve, alongside Tchéky Karyo who plays Julien Baptiste.
The first episode can now be found on iPlayer and there will be six episodes overall in the new season, with a new one airing each Sunday at 9pm on BBC One.
Need more inspo for decent crime dramas? Here’s the ones we found most gripping.
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