Is there a second series of The Outlaws?

Stephen Merchant's comedy-thriller WILL return

Stephen Merchant’s comedy-thriller The Outlaws will be back for a second series.

Six more episodes of the BBC One show are already in the can and will reunite the original cast as six offenders who met while serving a community payback service sentence in Bristol.

The second season was earlier this year back-to-back with the first, which was delayed because of Covid.

Merchant has said the paused allowed him to revisit the first series to tweak the script, knowing what would happen in the first.

And he said this could just be the start. ‘I quite like the idea, in theory, that you could have a whole new set of offenders in another series,’ Merchant previously told Chortle. ‘You could set it anywhere else in Manchester, or Glasgow or Dublin – it could be fun to have a show that never ends with just different sets of offenders – like Doctor Who.’

In series one, star Christopher Walken destroyed an original Banksy painting that the street artist had created just for that purpose. But what wasn’t planned was that a costume truck rolled into Bristol harbour.

Outlaws cast

The rest of the returning cast includes: Rhianne Barreto, Gamba Cole, Darren Boyd, Clare Perkins, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jessica Gunning, Charles Babalola, Nina Wadia, Tom Hanson, and Aiyana Goodfellow.

Series two is expected to air some time in 2022. Series one – which ends its terrestrial run from 9pm tonight (Monday November 29) – is available in full on iPlayer.

Merchant wrote the series with Elgin James, co-creator of US drama Mayans MC, and it is a co-production with Amazon Prime.