Starz In Talks For Second Season Of Irish Crime Drama ‘Dublin Murders’ – TCA

Peter White

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Gritty crime drama Dublin Murders could be exploring new cases after Starz opened talks for a second season.

The show, which is produced by Fremantle-owned Euston Films, Veritas Entertainment Group and Dublin-based Element Pictures and is a co-production with the BBC, launched on Starz on November 10.

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Jeffrey Hirsch, president and CEO, Starz, told Deadline that the show performed well across its services.

“The audience grew from the beginning to the end of the series, which for us is always a great indicator of success,” he said. “We’re currently in talks about more seasons. There’s a couple more books that we’re looking at right now, we’re trying to figure out what that looks like right now. We’ll hopefully continue to have good conversations.”

The series is an adaptation of Tana French’s crime thrillers and there are six books in her Dublin Murder Squad series. The drama stars C.B. Strike’s Killian Scott as Rob Reilly, a smart-suited detective whose English accent marks him as an outsider, who is dispatched to investigate the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of Dublin with his partner, Cassie Maddox, played by Penny Dreadful’s Sarah Greene. Against his better judgment and protected by his friendship with Cassie, he is pulled back into another case of missing children and forced to confront his own darkness. As the case intensifies, Rob and Cassie’s relationship is tested to the breaking point and when Cassie is sent undercover for another murder case, she is forced to come face to face with her own brutal reckoning.

If the show does get picked up, Euston Films is set to double down on working in Northern Ireland. For the first season of the show, 80% of the post-production was done in Belfast, via Yellow Moon, and Euston Films boss Kate Harwood recently told Deadline she’s hoping that the entirety of post-production would be done there in future.

The show, which was written by Sarah Phelps, who has penned Agatha Christie adaptations including The Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None, was also a hit for BBC One, averaging around 4 million viewers per episode.

But Harwood admitted that there are always challenges bringing big-budget drama to screen. She said that it took a long time to get the rights to French’s books.

“The BBC were always very loyal and on side from when we said we wanted to do it and then we had to wait a little bit for Sarah Phelps’ time,” she said. “As always with drama, when you have a star writer, their timetable is always part of it.”

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