TV & Movies

A New Season Of The Midwich Cuckoos Could Be Coming “To A Town Near You”

The show's star Keeley Hawes has hinted there's a future yet for series.

by El Hunt
'The Midwich Cuckoos' S2
Sky

If you’ve got your fingers crossed for a second season of Sky’s sci-fi drama The Midwich Cuckoos, it looks like you’re in luck — show star Keeley Hawes (It’s A Sin, Bodyguard) has let the extraterrestrial cat out the bag. Speaking to Radio Times, the actor hinted that a new instalment could be coming "to a town near you". So here’s everything we know about a second season of The Midwich Cuckoos.

When asked about another season of the show, Hawes said, “I’d certainly like to see more of the Cuckoos and their adventures,” she added. “There’s lots you could do. You could have lots of fun with them."

Adapted from John Wyndham’s 1957 novel of the same name, The Midwich Cuckoos tells the extraterrestrial tale of a sleepy English village where every single woman resident of child-bearing age suddenly becomes pregnant following a mysterious alien presence enveloping the village for a single day. In the book, an elderly resident called Gordon Zellaby realises that the women’s newborn children are parasitic aliens with dangerous mind powers– but in the telly spin-off, solving this mystery is left to Hawes’ character, local psychiatrist Dr. Susannah Zellaby. In place of an isolated village, this new version of Midwich is a London commuter town of middle-class liberals.

Grilled on the possibility of a second season, the show’s director Alice Troughton touched on similar ideas to Hawes, and hinted at the idea of a more wide-spread alien takeover with consequences beyond Midwich.

"The idea of the Cuckoos is a universal idea,” she told Radio Times. “You could do The Midwich Cuckoos – we don’t know whether they landed in India or the Himalayas. We don’t know where they landed. We just choose to show Amersham, because that’s where we’re focused on. But who knows where they ended up?"

Last Night In Soho’s Synnøve Karlsen, who plays Zellaby’s daughter Cassie Stone, also added fuel to the fire saying: “There’s plenty of scope for the story continuing. Cuckoos have a sort of strange feature of popping up in the strangest places, don’t they?” she hinted. “Midwich, for example. They could be coming to a town near you, soon. I just made that one up as I went along. I don’t know anything about anything!"

Meanwhile, creator David Farr kept things slightly more vague, insisting that the story of the Cuckoos – in Midwich, at least – is definitely over.

It completely finishes, and that’s really important to all of us,” he said. That said,“If Sky get very enthusiastic, then there is the possibility of it expanding and becoming something slightly different, I would say,” he hinted. “But it’s not a kind of classic repeatable. It’s definitely not that. It was never intended to be."

Watch this space, then – but be prepared to visit somewhere new next time around.