The Outlaws Returns for a Second Season on Prime

The British crime comedy deals with twists onscreen and off in season two 

Back for a second season, The Outlaws finds the ragtag group of seven lawbreakers thrown together to do community service now involved with organized crime. They still have time to serve on their sentences but that doesn’t mean their service to a kingpin known as The Dean will be done with them once they’ve finished paying their debt to society. 

So Rani (Rhianne Barreto), Ben (Gamba Cole), Greg (Stephen Merchant), Frank (Christopher Walken), Gabby (Eleanor Tomlinson), John (Darren Boyd) and Myrna (Clare Perkins) will need to come together in ways they never imagined to escape their latest predicament. Prime Video“When I was starting out in TV,” explains Merchant, who created the series with Elgin James (Mayans M.C.), “someone said to me early on, ‘One of the things you should do in writing TV shows is you should chase your characters up a tree and then you should throw rocks at them. And I feel like in the first season, we chased them up the tree and in the second season we’re throwing rocks at them… And so I think in essence what I mean is we turn the heat up under the characters.” 

Merchant and the producers also had to deal with some heat. A few weeks into filming the first season, production had to be shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But with that came a silver lining as it gave Merchant the opportunity to write the second season while tweaking the first. So when shooting resumed last year, they were able to film both seasons back-to-back.  Prime VideoOn the show’s Bristol, England set, meanwhile, there was also a mishap that resulted in a costume truck winding up in the harbour. Luckily, no one was hurt and filming had already wrapped so its effects were minimal. 

However, the whole thing gave a good scare to everyone involved. “It sort of summed up the experience,” Merchant says, “that it was one more kind of accident in a sort of catalogue of a troubled shoot, not because the actors were difficult or anything but more just COVID had struck and all the kind of burdens of that and losing locations… And somehow, the costume truck sort of submerged in the water seemed to symbolize the arduousness of shooting the whole thing.” 

The Outlaws, streaming on Prime Video