What To Know
- Season 2 of Apple TV’s Hijack shifts the action from an airplane to an underground Berlin train, with Idris Elba’s Sam Nelson once again at the center of a high-stakes hostage crisis.
- Executive producer Jim Field Smith explains why he wanted to set it underground as well as teases what’s going on personally with Sam this season.
In the first season of this thrilling Apple TV drama, Idris Elba‘s Sam Nelson had to manage a crisis in the air. Now, for Season 2, the action has moved underground, with a Berlin train and its commuters taken hostage. Sam is at the heart of that crisis on board. Watch an exclusive sneak peek from the January 14 premiere above.
“Part of the thinking behind [setting Season 2 underground] was I wanted to kind of reflect Season 1,” Hijack executive producer Jim Field Smith tells TV Insider. And so he looked to the “direct opposite” of a plane.
“I wanted to put Sam in a literal and metaphorical maze where he’s trying to find the center of that maze,” he continues. “He’s trying to get to an answer, he’s trying to get to the truth and underground, the light can’t get in. And so there’s a lot of thematic connection in there between what Sam is actually looking for on a physical level and what he’s searching for in himself.”
With Season 2, he found “more confidence in the storytelling and the character,” Smith continued. And since the audience already knows the character of Sam — or at least “thinks” they do, the EP teased — he could focus on world-building. “There’s a little bit less work to do in terms of getting Sam embedded into the audience’s psyche. So it means you can get up and running quicker in a second season. There’s some shorthand there with the audience, which was really, really helpful to me.”
In the first season, while dealing with the crisis on the plane, Sam was also trying to get home to reconcile with his ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams). He learned he couldn’t just fix things with a Gucci bracelet. “Things aren’t that simple. Life is not that binary and actually he can’t apply his slightly business-like logic to everything. He needs to connect with people on a slightly more empathetic level,” Jim Field Smith explains of Sam’s journey then.
Now, heading into the second season with Idris Elba’s character, “this is a guy that’s not just been through the events of Season 1, which has changed him as a person, but I wanted to show that something else has happened since then because there’s a passage of time in between the two seasons,” notes Smith. “I didn’t want it to be a direct pickup from Season 1. So the Sam you meet at the start of Season 2 is not the Sam you left behind at the end of Season 1. He has clearly been through some trauma, and we enjoy understanding and unpacking that in this season. And I think when you find out what he’s been through, it really helps you connect with the choices that he’s making in this season, some of which are kind of spicy.”
What are you hoping to see in Season 2? Let us know in the comments section below.
Hijack, Season 2 Premiere, Wednesday, January 14, Apple TV
