Not all hope is lost for “Mare of Easttown” fans hoping for a second season, with creator Brad Ingelsby saying he’s “always open” to revisit the series under the right circumstances.
Ingelsby revealed Tuesdday he would “welcome the chance” to pick back up “Mare of Easttown” for another installment, but only if he and the team could craft a story that’s “as compelling as the first one.”
“It would be hard to jump back in with ‘Mare’ and compete with losing a son — that was always a thing that I struggled with with ‘Mare,’ was, how do you compete with that?’” Ingelsby said during HBO’s 2025 programming slate presentation in Los Angeles. “If there’s a way to come back to ‘Mare’ where she has something else to deal with that we feel equally compelling emotionally, and would be able to bring the viewer back in, I’m always open to revisiting ‘Mare.’ I love that character. I love Julianne [Nicholson’s] character. I love Jean Smart’s character.”
With the “rich” emotional journey Mare goes on in the first installment, Ingelsby added that “you’d have to give her some space to build up another another emotional trauma or decision” to fuel another season.
“There were lots of plot lines in ‘Mare’ we could explore — she’s a detective, you could always come up with a plot — Bu the emotional story that I felt we were able to tell in Season 1 was going to be hard to compete with and to try to compete with it, I think would always start to feel less than.”
In the meantime, Ingelsby came up with another idea that lives in the “same part of the world as ‘Mare’” in the Philadelphia suburbs, which evolved into “Task,” an upcoming HBO series following an FBI agent who heads a Task Force to put an end to a string of drug-house robberies led by an unsuspecting family man, per the official logline.
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Tom Pelphrey, Emilia Jones and Thuso Mbedu, among others, “Task” will similarly center on working class people and families, which Ingelsby, after growing up in the area, said he knows “so well,” adding “I feel like I can write them with conviction and honesty.”
“What always interested me about these stories is trying to portray them with a lot of empathy, a lot of humanity, to really get into the emotional ties of the working class people, and to portray them with courage and honor,” Ingelsby said. “That’s really my goal is to write these characters with layers and complexity that we don’t often get to see.”
