The Latest 'Sanditon' Season 2 Trailer Hints at Romance and Scandal

With just over a month to go until period drama Sanditon returns for its highly anticipated second season, the marketing machine is cranking into high gear. (Not that, I expect, any of us are complaining.) PBS Masterpiece has released a second Season 2 teaser, featuring a dash of new footage and the promise of more romance and scandal in everyone's favorite seaside town. 

Much like the first teaser for the series' return, this clip is also super brief---just 30 seconds once more---but it still manages to highlight how different the show will look in its second season. Star Rose Williams is back as heroine Charlotte Heywood, but it seems that the disastrous end of her relationship with Sidney Parker (Theo James) last season has soured her on the whole idea of romance. Where she was eager to find love in Season 1, this trailer shows us a cautious and slightly more jaded young woman. And, who can blame her, really? (It was a difficult break-up for all of us.) 

Luckily, should Charlotte change her mind about love, it looks as though she'll have plenty of romantic options to choose from in Season 2, from dishy army colonel Francis Lennox (Tom Weston-Jones) as dynamic Colonel Francis Lennox to Bohemian artist Charles Lockhart (Alexander Vlahos), both of whom we catch brief glimpses of in this clip. And her starry-eyed younger sister Allison (Rosie Graham) seems confident enough in the power of love for them both. 

“I have a plan for us both to find husbands here in Sanditon,” the younger Heywood daughter firmly tells her sister. And while Charlotte may protest that “love is not as simple as you seem to think," well. This is a Jane Austen story, after all. 

The teaser also shows us what we must assume is Charlotte's reunion with bestie---and megarich heiress---Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke), and gives us our first look at Esther (Charlotte Spencer) and Edward Denham (Jack Fox), whose relationship seems frostier than it ever has before. 

Watch the trailer for yourselves below. 

Per the official press release, there's going to be a lot going on in Season 2, including the arrival of an army regiment in town and Georgiana's involvement in a story that explores the sugar trade's dark connection to slavery.

Season 2 of Sanditon continues Jane Austen’s classic quandary of how independent-minded young women can make their way in patriarchal Regency-era England. Society insists that they take a husband, and some women, such as Charlotte’s sister Alison, can’t wait to find one. But others, notably Charlotte and Georgiana, have mixed feelings about matrimony.

Another Austenian theme is the allure of military men. During the Napoleonic Wars, young officers moved around the country with their troops, providing eligible women dashing dance partners, who were usually more romantically experienced than the local lads. Sanditon features just such an enticing encampment of potential husbands and heartbreakers.

Sanditon is filled with other delights as well as pointed social commentary. As the series depicts, English ladies really did organize a sugar boycott to protest the evils of slavery connected to the sugar trade. In Sanditon, Georgiana has more than enough reasons to lead the banner in this cause.

The new six-episode second season will officially premiere on Sunday, March 20. Sanditon Season 1 is now available to stream in full on PBS Passport.