Helen Mirren spends most of this trailer in a flat cap, and by the end of it she has a revolver in her fist and somebody else’s blood down the front of her white top. That is the shortest possible summary of where “MobLand” has got to. Paramount+ dropped the full Season 2 trailer on Thursday, and the pitch is no longer that the Harrigans are fighting London. The pitch is that the Harrigans are fighting each other, and the loudest line in a hundred and fifteen seconds of shouting is somebody saying, flatly, that they want Conrad dead.
The date landed with it. Season 2 premieres globally on Friday, September 18, with ten episodes rolling out weekly and the finale on November 20, and the closing card puts it plainly in red over a wall of hunting dogs: MOBLAND, NEW SEASON, STREAMING SEPTEMBER 18. Paramount+’s own synopsis says the family struggle to show a unified front while “rising rivals threaten their fractured criminal empire,” and that fixer Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy) must “walk a dangerous tightrope when tensions within the family intensify.” The trailer’s job is to show you what fractured looks like. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for MobLand and the Season 2 threats the trailer puts on the table.
The pitch is no longer that the Harrigans are fighting London. The pitch is that the Harrigans are fighting each other.”
It opens quiet, which is the right call for a show this loud. A warm, shallow close-up, a hand, a room full of soft lamps, and a voice asking “May I speak plainly?” before delivering the verdict the whole season apparently hangs on: “This family is in a death spiral.” From there the trailer starts laying out the board with a speed that borders on rude. Two women talk in a bright flat and the line lands over them, “Conrad, the Harrigans run North London,” and then, over Harry walking a wet street in a dark coat, “and my job is to prevent that from changing.”
Half a minute in, it gets specific about the business, and the specifics are grim. Hands work over vacuum-sealed bricks on a steel table, a spoon cooks something over a flame, and the line running underneath is “we’ve lost fentanyl, now heroin.” That is a supply problem, not a feud, and it reframes everything around it. Then the temperature drops: “we are surrounded by sharks,” “ripe for the picking,” and, from an older man in a flat cap standing in freezing fog, “if you ask me, it’s already begun.” Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan), sunk in an armchair with a drink, asks what he means. The answer is one word, and the trailer lets it sit there. “The war.”
Then come the cast cards, and they are doing a specific job. Bullet holes puncture an oil painting of hunting hounds tearing into something while the names arrive one at a time, billed like a boxing card: ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE TOM HARDY, then GOLDEN GLOBE AWARD NOMINEE PIERCE BROSNAN. Earlier the same treatment gave us greyhounds sprinting down a dirt track at the Green Park stadium with FROM THE UNDERWORLD OF GUY RITCHIE burning across them in red. This is a series that knows exactly which three faces it is selling, and the key art says the quiet part too. Two words above the title: CHAOS REIGNS.
The middle third is where the family actually cracks open. Maeve Harrigan (Helen Mirren) gets a close-up lit like a horror film and the line “the clock is ticking,” and a watch face fills the screen to make sure nobody missed it. Harry sits on a park bench opposite Jan (Joanne Froggatt) in the autumn cold, two coffees going untouched between them, and she tells him “you’ve spent all her life fixing for that family” before landing the harder one: “you’re not the remedy.” It is the only genuinely still scene in the trailer, and it is the one that hurts.
The threat finally gets a name, and it is a name Season 1 already planted. Harry, sat in a wood-panelled office, says “Kat McAllister, she’s going to eat us piece by piece.” That is Janet McTeer’s crime boss, the one who spent last season trying to buy Harry away from the Harrigans and got told no. She turns up on a grey street in a long coat telling somebody “show me what you can do,” and she turns up again at a table opposite a young woman in a scene the trailer deliberately half-hides. “Your father knows you’re here?” “No. It’s time for change.” If you have watched this show, you can guess which Harrigan is sitting across from the wolf, and the trailer is betting you will.
Meanwhile the plot machinery grinds along in the background and it is genuinely funny in places. Colin Tattersall (Toby Jones) takes a call in a parked car and purrs “there’s been an exciting development,” and somebody elsewhere reports that Conrad “went completely bonkers berserk,” which is a sentence Guy Ritchie’s underworld has been building towards for twenty-five years. Then the hammer: over a shot of Conrad standing by a car in dark glasses, a voice we are not shown says “I want Conrad dead.” The trailer never tells you whose voice it is. That is the whole trick of the thing.
The last thirty seconds simply detonate. A suburban street gets the word REIGN slapped across it in wet red paint. A house burns from the inside out. A room full of gas canisters goes up in a fireball. Maeve fires a handgun into red darkness, the muzzle flash whiting out her glasses, and later she stands in a diner with blood sprayed across her chest holding that snub-nosed revolver dead level at somebody’s face. Paddy Considine’s Kevin swings something heavy at a man through a doorway. Somebody gets dragged the length of a bus.
And then it hands the ending to Brosnan, who takes it with both hands. “Want a war?” somebody snarls. “I’ll give you a war.” The final sequence puts Conrad in a stadium hospitality suite in tinted glasses, a pistol coming up in his hand, Maeve beside him in full fur, and he delivers the closing line straight down the lens with the delight of a man who has waited his whole career to say it: “We are the Harrigans! You don’t know the name? Google us!” It should be ridiculous. It absolutely is not, and if Season 2 can keep that tone balanced on the edge for ten episodes rather than falling off it, this thing is going to be enormous. Either way, September 18 is a Friday, and the Harrigans have never once made a Friday quiet.
What Do You Think? Who actually says “I want Conrad dead” — a rival, or somebody sitting at the Harrigan dinner table? Is Kat McAllister a big enough villain to carry a whole season after being seeded so lightly in the first one? And is Maeve with a revolver in her hand the best thing this show has ever put on screen, or does Helen Mirren deserve a story that is not just Conrad’s weather?
See you on the next binge!
