Leslye Headland Shares Her Vision for ‘The Acolyte’ Season 2: “It feels like everyone’s really expecting to get a second season”

The latest chapter in the Star Wars franchise premiered several weeks ago, eliciting a highly polarized response. While some fans are hailing it as one of the best Star Wars shows, others are calling it the worst.

In reality, the truth likely lies somewhere in between. I must admit, the show improved with the release of Episode 5, largely because the plot began to pick up. Additionally, the choreography has been outstanding.

While the show has received relatively high ratings from critics, its audience score on various aggregator sites is abysmal. To get a complete picture of the viewership, we will have to wait until the end of the week for the numbers to become available. Last week’s episode saw a 31% decrease in “minutes watched,” which could be due to several factors, including the episode’s shorter length compared to previous ones. However, it might also indicate that fans are abandoning the show en masse.

Even before season 1 premiered, producer Rayne Roberts teased plans for season 2 and mentioned that they are ready to hit the writer’s room. In a recent interview, Leslye Headland revealed that she hopes to get at least three seasons to tell her story.

Now that we are more than halfway through the show’s 8-episode run, it’s time to seriously question, “Will there be a season 2?”

At this point, we don’t know, and neither does Headland. In her Entertainment Weekly interview, she revealed that season 1 will have a definite ending, providing fans with resolution on most plot points.

I’ll tell you my philosophy on first seasons. Something that I’ve noticed is first seasons will end on what should have been the break into act two. It feels like everyone’s really expecting to get a second season, and I don’t feel that’s a good idea. I think you should put everything you can into the first season and give the audience a nice resolution that feels satisfying, but enough nods to mysteries that you would want to see a second season. So it’s a little bit of both. You don’t want to leave it so wrapped up that, like Obi-Wan or a standalone mini-series, that there’s no reason to watch a second season, but I think there’s enough stuff in the last few episodes that you would want to have answered.

Headland also explained that she poured almost everything into season 1. However, if the show gets a subsequent season, she is ready and has plenty of ideas, though she hasn’t written an outline for season 2 yet.

I remember reading that Vince Gilligan in writing and doing the first season of Breaking Bad really didn’t plan on, “We’re getting seven more seasons, and this is what’s going to happen to Walter White.” It was much more, “Here’s everything we got. We’re throwing everything at the wall.” And then with the pickup, he mapped out, “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen over the course of however many seasons.”

So I took that approach with this. I threw everything into season 1, because who knows what’s going to happen? And then I’d say there are four to five major mysteries and plot points that have to get hit in season 2, but until we get a proper pickup, I worry that spending a lot of time in that world — especially being in a period where I’ve worked so long on this project that honestly I’m exhausted by it coming out — to kind of jump right into like, “All right, season 2….” It will probably be more that I know what needs to happen, and I know what the character development needs to be in order to hit the plot points and the character points for a second, third, or fourth season. So I look forward to working on that, but right now, I haven’t.

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