When Does Taboo Season 2 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Taboo about?

Tom Hardy plays a man returning to 1814 London with a cache of stolen diamonds and an appetite for revenge, and the show refuses to make him likeable or even fully comprehensible. He grunts, mutters, and conducts himself with the erratic intensity of someone who has spent too long in hostile places. It's a period mystery centered on colonial wealth, family secrets, and the machinery of Empire, but what gives it its edge is Hardy's commitment to playing James Delaney as feral. He's not a charming antihero. He's dangerous to the people around him, and the show doesn't ask you to forgive that.

Steven Knight's eight-episode arc unfolds with genuine slowness. Delaney positions himself at the center of competing interests: the East India Company wants his diamonds, his sister wants him dead (or wants something from him, it's unclear), his father's ghost seems to be speaking to him. The writing builds atmosphere through obfuscation. You're often uncertain what Delaney actually plans to do, what he's capable of, or whether he's sane. That uncertainty is the point. Jonathan Pryce as a Company man and Stephen Graham as an American agent circle around him, trying to understand what they're dealing with, and they're as lost as the audience.

Critics found much to admire in the show's formal ambition and its refusal to sand down its rough edges, though some felt the deliberate pacing crossed into tedium. It became a cult object instead of a mainstream hit. The eight episodes don't conclude a larger story so much as capture a particular moment of Delaney's machinations, which meant audiences hoping for closure often walked away frustrated. In the landscape of prestige drama, Taboo remains an outlier. It shares DNA with shows like Penny Dreadful in its Gothic sensibility and with The Knick in its willingness to move slowly through period detail, but it's far more committed to moral ambiguity and structural opacity than either.

The show's real limitation might be that it demands viewers sit with discomfort and confusion across eight hours while Tom Hardy glares and grunts, with no guarantee of payoff. That's a specific kind of television, and it will exclude as many people as it fascinates. For those willing to meet it there, it's one of the strangest and most unsettling things the BBC has produced.

Created by Steven Knight, Chips Hardy, Tom Hardy

Is Taboo renewed or cancelled?

Why did Taboo end?

Taboo concluded after a single eight-episode season, but the show did not end because audiences rejected it. The series, starring Tom Hardy as a returning soldier tangled in 19th-century London intrigue, was critically acclaimed and pulled strong viewership for BBC One, earning an 8.3 rating on IMDb. What stopped it was a practical matter of production: the show was ambitious and expensive to make, with elaborate period sets, a large cast, and intricate plotting that demanded significant resources per episode. After the initial season aired in early 2017, creator Steven Knight and the network appear to have decided that a second season would either require resources they were unwilling to commit or that the story they wanted to tell had been told well enough in those eight hours.

The gap between seasons proved telling. Rather than rushing forward with new episodes, Taboo sat idle for years, which typically signals either a lack of creative momentum or a recalibration of priorities. By the time there was any serious talk of revival, the moment had passed. The show had made its mark and left audiences wanting more, but the economics of a prestige historical drama on broadcast television, combined with the sheer difficulty of getting all the pieces back together (cast scheduling, sets, crew availability), made continuing feel like an uphill battle. Sometimes a show ends not because it failed, but because the conditions that created it don't align again.

Taboo Season 2 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

Taboo seasons

Taboo trailer

Where to watch Taboo

fuboTVstreamPeacock PremiumstreamPeacock Premium PlusstreamAmazon VideobuyApple TV StorebuyGoogle Play MoviesbuyFandango At Homebuy

Taboo latest news