Everything to Remember Ahead of 'World on Fire' Season 2

It’s been three and a half years since Season 1 of World on Fire aired, despite Season 2 being greenlit before the PBS premiere, as filming on two continents during a pandemic proved impossible. With a large cast and a storyline that encompassed the confusion, pain, and horror of war, it was a brilliant but frequently harrowing series. We saw ordinary people rise to the challenge of war, grapple with class differences (in England), and show courage they didn’t even know they possessed. While it seemed that sometimes chance meetings and coincidences drove the plot as much as historical events, the fine acting and production kept us riveted.

The English section of the storyline revolved around two Manchester families, the Bennetts, working-class and from a pacifist-socialist background, and the Chase family, middle-class and highly dysfunctional. In Poland, we followed the fortunes of the Tomaszewski family, and in Paris, the lives of two LGBTQ characters.

If you didn’t know it already, two of the original cast, Sean Bean as Douglas Bennett and Helen Hunt as American journalist Nancy Campbell, are not returning for Season 2. Nancy’s radio broadcasts from Germany formed a fairly fluid structure for the plot, and her personal story included her support for a German-Jewish family who had a child with a disability. Season 1 began with the Phony War of 1939, the brief waiting period after the U.K. and France had declared war on Germany. But the situation changed dramatically later that year, when Poland was invaded and fell, followed by the collapse of Belgium and France in 1940, the evacuation of Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain.