The Patient major spoilers follow.
Well that got dark quickly. FX/Hulu/Disney+'s limited series The Patient (from the producers of The Americans) saw patient Domhnall Gleeson chain therapist Steve Carell to a wall in his basement in order to help him be… a bit less murdery. Not completely murderless, just less murdery.
With season one ending on quite a *final* note, are we going to see any more from this merry pair?
The Patient season 2 potential release date: Has it been renewed?
Technically, FX hasn't cancelled or renewed the show, but it was always billed as a limited series, so we'll be frank from the off: it doesn't seem likely that there'll be any more of The Patient.
At the end of season one, Gleeson's Sam murdered Carell's Alan as a kind of proxy for murdering his father, then, doing what Dexter could never do, he chained himself to the wall in his place, so that the world would be protected from his impulses.
Without Alan, the show would just be the further adventures of a serial killer, which might be fun, but sounds like a morally dubious premise to say the least.
Producer Joel Fields put a lid on it, telling USA Today, "We’re done after this… That’s The Patient, and we hope you enjoyed it. But we’re not done making shows, so we’re just trying to figure out what to do next."
Star Domhnall Gleeson agrees that there's not really anywhere else to go. He told Decider, "When I read it, I was like, 'That is the only way this series can end. That is the most perfect.' I thought they just stuck the landing… And I thought they found a way to finish something which for a while, I was like, 'I don’t know what the way to do this is.'"
The Patient season 2 plot: What would have happened?
No Alan, no plot, but Gleeson still had some ideas about what would have happened for Sam after the cameras stopped rolling. Short version: more murdering.
"I think slowly, he’d start convincing himself that he’s probably cured now," he told Decider. "I don’t know that it’d last. I don’t know that delusion wouldn’t start taking over. But I do think in that moment he’s learned something really important. I just wonder without the real ongoing gift of therapy how capable he would be of sticking to it."
The Patient season 2 trailer: is there one?
Not without a renewal, alas. Until that happy day, sate yourselves with another look at the season one trailer.
The Patient is streaming on Disney+ in the UK and on Hulu in the US.
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Deputy Editor, Digital Spy Chris has over 25 years' experience as a writer and editor, having worked as a journalist covering TV and movies since the '90s. Starting out as a TV listings editor at the Press Association, he was quickly hired by the nascent Heat magazine, where he rose to become Senior Editor, interviewing the likes of Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson and Paris Hilton. Over the years he has written about entertainment with clarity and wit for Heat, Elle, Q, The Telegraph and of course Digital Spy, and has served many times as a judge in the Royal Television Society awards. He has written and recorded a novelty single with Lord Lloyd-Webber, written scripts for the National TV Awards, made Noel Edmonds cry, accidentally punched an Inbetweener and stolen a small piece of rubble from the Battle of Hogwarts movie set. (They can't have it back.)
