'Sherwood' Season 2 Introduces a New Sheriff of Nottingham

The BBC has finally released the first images for the second season of Sherwood. The series may sound like a period piece about Robin Hood, but the 2022 critical darling was anything but. It presented itself as a true-crime mystery based on a pair of murders that occurred in the famed forest in 2004 that wound up creating the largest manhunt in U.K. history at the time. It was a series about the long-running fallout of Margaret Thatcher's famous breaking of the miner's strike and the Tory government's decades-long "Spy Cops" program.

The first season was initially meant as a limited series, an A-list cast doing a six-episode close-ended story about healing thirty years after the Red Wall town was initially bitterly divided by the collapse of the strike and the decades of poverty that followed. However, the series was so popular and the critical response so rapturous that the BBC decided to re-up Sherwood for a second season, with discussions of it turning into an anthology series, not unlike Showtrial, with the new season featuring an all-new story and cast.

However, that did not turn out to be the case. Instead, the new season is still set in the same town as Season 1, with seven returning cast members reprising their roles. It will once again center around the same family that was part of the miner's strike back in the 1980s, that was part of the Spy Cops scandal in the first season, and that will now be integral to the new drama.