By Lacy Baugher for Drama on November 13th, 2018

‘Jamestown’ Season 2 Will Arrive on PBS Passport This November

Sophie Rundle, Niamh Walsh and Naomi Battrick in "Jamestown" Season 2. (Photo: © Carnival Film & Television Ltd. 2018)

Get ready to go back to the colonies – Jamestown Season 2 is finally coming to America this Fall.

The second season of the popular period drama will once again be available to view on PBS’ Passport streaming service, as well as Amazon Prime’s PBS Masterpiece channel, beginning November 21. This time, however, episodes will drop weekly, rather than all at once. So you’ll have to pace yourself a bit more than last time.

(Your friendly neighborhood recapper is kind of relieved about this, to be honest.)

Jamestown focuses on the early days of the first British settlers as they embark on their lives in America. Set in 1619 as the first women arrived in the settlement, it tells the story of Verity, Jocelyn and Alice, three brides sent to start new lives – and make new marriages – in the new world.

The series’ second season will also be comprised of eight episodes. Stars Naomi Battrick, Sophie Rundle, and Niamh Walsh are all returning, along with Max Beesley, Kalani Queypo, Jason Flemyng, Dean Lennox Kelly and more.              

Season 2 returns to a thriving Jamestown, but the status quo will soon be disrupted by birth, death and broken marriages. The settlers find themselves at the heart of adventure once more as new romantic connections are made, desires repressed, and even the purest of loves will be tested. The power of politics will impact the whole community, as the battle for supremacy continues.

Watch the PBS trailer for Season 2 for yourselves: [video:https://www.pbs.org/video/trailer-als6c1/ align:center] The Sky One trailer released earlier this year in the U.K. is pretty similar, but has several different scenes included – and is ten seconds longer, for you completionists out there.

 

Season 1 concluded with the arrival of the first slaves in the colony, which indicates that the show may be taking something of a darker twist in the coming episodes. It’s hard to imagine a Jamestown in which slavery doesn’t become something of a flashpoint among the colonists, particularly given the horrified expressions they were all sporting over this development at the end of the finale.

The synopsis for the first episode of Season 2 reads as follows:

Jamestown’s first baby brings joy to the settlement but the discovery of a terrible crime throws suspicion upon all inhabitants. When Jocelyn’s position in the colony comes under threat, she forges a surprising new connection.

Don’t worry, if you need a refresher on all the drama of Jamestown’s first season, we have recaps for that.             

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Passport is a membership benefit for those who support their local PBS stations, allowing donors to access a library of public television programming whenever they want, through Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, the PBS app and an online web portal. Each local station has its own localized Passport experience: For example, you can activate WETA Passport right here and support WETA here in the Washington, D.C. area.  

Jamestown is one of a handful of dramas that have been offered to PBS local station members in this way. (See also: The Frankie Drake Mysteries), and it’s a rather exciting method of getting more British and British-adjacent content in front of viewers.

Many fans have been excitedly asking when we’d get to see the story of Jamestown to continue, and it’s certainly thrilling to know that we don’t have much longer to wait.

Are you a fan of Jamestown? Did you watch Season 1? What would you like to see in the second season? Let’s discuss in the comments.

By Lacy Baugher for Drama on November 13th, 2018
Lacy Baugher

Lacy's love of British TV is embarrassingly extensive, but primarily centers around evangelizing all things Doctor Who, and watching as many period dramas as possible.

Digital media type by day, she also has a fairly useless degree in British medieval literature, and dearly loves to talk about dream poetry, liminality, and the medieval religious vision. (Sadly, that opportunity presents itself very infrequently.) York apologist, Ninth Doctor enthusiast, and unabashed Ravenclaw. Say hi on Threads or Blue Sky at @LacyMB. 

Explore More

More to Love from Telly Visions

  • 'Jamestown' Recap: Season 3, Episode 8

    Previously on Jamestown: Jocelyn, Verity, Pedro and James Read all head off to search for the mariners who originally brought slaves to Jamestown. Along the way, Joss gets shot with an arrow in the gut, but doesn’t die thanks to James savvy medical skills, which involve digging around in her body with a dirty knife. It’s fine. Why start doing hygiene now? Afterward, as an injured Jocelyn continues to traipse through the countryside, Verity decides to give her a pep talk about James Read and how great he is and eventually both of these idiots admit they’re in love – kind of. But Jocelyn isn’t down to give up her freedom to any man Elsewhere, Temperance has decided she’s over everything and enlists the help of Maria to help drive her husband insane so they can go back to England with their unborn baby.  For a full rundown of all this weirdness, our Episode 7 recap is this way.

    As most viewers probably already knew coming into this, Season 3 of Jamestown is the series’ last. Whether this is due to poor ratings, expensive filming costs or simply the cast’s desire to move on is unclear. But though the series’ finale does try to tie up most of the (many, many) outstanding plotlines this show, Jamestown somehow manages to end with both a bang and a whimper, dedicating its final moments to the long-hinted-at native attack on the colony, which historically did kill hundreds of settlers. But since that climactic moments takes place during the episode’s final minutes, it feels like nothing so much as a cliffhanger into Season 4 that never got to go anywhere.

    By Lacy Baugher for Drama on 8/23/2019
    At least this finale leaves us on a happy note here (Photo: Courtesy of Carnival Film & Television Limited 2019)

  • 'Jamestown' Recap: Season 3, Episode 7

    Previously on Jamestown: Since Temperance is pregnant, Yeardley decides to write a will, in which he transfers ownership of Pedro and Maria to his unborn child. Everyone in town is suddenly real upset about this, which is somehow a step further than owning people generally, flogging them and forcing them to pick your crops for free, I don’t know. But whatever, suddenly James, Verity and a bunch of other townsfolks are real invested in finding the mariners who brought slaves to Jamestown in the first place, though the reasons for that are wildly unclear beyond the fact that Pedro would like to kill them for what they did. Which I suppose make sense. And despite the fact that Crabtree is a powerful man who could stop Yeardley from doing, well…basically anything, he decides to let himself be arrested instead. See our recap of Episode 6 for more.

    Just when it seemed as though Jamestown had lost the particularly bonkers style of storytelling that made it such fun to watch, the series comes roaring back with an installment that features everything from unhygienic outdoor surgery, drug-fueled nightmare visions, an out of wedlock pregnancy, a murder cover-up and some super awkward match-making.

    By Lacy Baugher for Drama on 8/16/2019
    Verity hasn't had a ton to do this season, but she looks amazing. (Photo: Courtesy of Carnival Film & Television Limited 2019)