ITV has announced today that they’ve commissioned a third season (or series, in British parlance) of Broadchurch, which stars David Tennant and Olivia Colman.
The first season of Broadchurch focused on the death of a local schoolboy in the fictional, titular town. Detectives Alex Hardy (Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Colman) arrive to investigate, which leads to them uncovering suspicions and prompting media scrutiny of the town. The second season followed the reveal of the killer at the end of the first, his subsequent trial, and a reopening of a case. Running only 16 episodes so far, Broadchurch has been a big success on both sides of the Atlantic, enough to prompt ITV to launch into the third season with the main actors and writer Chris Chibnall returning.
Chibnall seems quite excited to be writing the next season of Broadchurch, commenting that “this third chapter has been a glint in my eye for a long time and I’m thrilled to be writing these characters once again.” Hopefully this means that he already knew where things were going during the second season, thus avoiding some of the problems that other series have faced when they go on for a bit too long.
Further details on casting and development for the next season of Broadchurch are not yet available, but we can assume that this season will develop out of what happened in the previous two.
As always, we’ll keep you posted when we hear more.