An envelope in the mailbox of a big old house on a leafy New Jersey street, a letter inside signed by someone who calls themself The Watcher, and a family that keeps reading when any sensible person would have called a moving truck. That image carried “The Watcher” to the top of the Netflix charts in the fall of 2022. After four years in which the show seemed to have vanished, the letters are about to start arriving again. Netflix announced on Friday that the second season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s horror mystery will begin production this fall in New York, with Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale returning as Nora and Dean Brannock.
They are not coming back alone, because Margo Martindale returns as Maureen, the nosy neighbor everyone calls Mo, and Isabel Gravitt is back as the Brannocks’ daughter, Ellie. The return is an odd one by any measure, since the series was first conceived as a limited series and then renewed in November 2022 alongside two more seasons of the duo’s true crime anthology “Monster.” The show was renewed a month after it premiered and then left on the shelf while its creators made three more seasons of something else, which is not how a hit is usually treated. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the first season of “The Watcher”, including how it ended.
The show was renewed a month after it premiered and then left on the shelf while its creators made three more seasons of something else, which is not how a hit is usually treated.”
Deadline, which put the renewal date at November 7th, 2022, said the wait “may be the longest gap ever between a season of a TV series getting a greenlight and it going into production,” and it is hard to find a better candidate. The backstory explains most of it. “The Watcher” and “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” debuted within a couple of weeks of each other that fall, both products of Murphy’s large five-year overall deal with Netflix. Work on “Monster” started right away, while “The Watcher” went dormant. A few months after the renewals, Murphy’s deal with Netflix ran out, and he went back to 20th Television at Disney, where he started developing and producing new shows almost immediately.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos all but admitted the problem this week, speaking about the streamer’s overall deals at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference. “A big challenge, I think even in the Ryan Murphy deal when we brought it on, was he had all these commitments to everybody else,” Sarandos said, according to Deadline. The arrangement has now flipped, so that Murphy executive produces both “The Watcher” and “Monster” for Netflix while his overall deal sits at 20th TV, which pays his overhead. Brennan, who already runs “Monster,” will serve as showrunner on the second season. Crystle Roberson Dorsey will direct and executive produce, which puts the day-to-day work of the season in the hands of the people who were closest to it in the first place.
For most of those four years, even the cast had no idea what was happening. Watts told Entertainment Weekly in 2024 that she had not heard any updates on the show’s future. The first real sign of life came only in September, when The Hollywood Reporter asked Brennan whether the second season was next on his slate. “Yes. I was just writing that,” he answered, and when he was pressed for a tease, he offered only “Nothing,” adding that he was being kept in the dark himself, before promising, “It’s gonna be good, though.” Asked about timing, Brennan said, “I don’t know yet. Watch this space!” Less than two weeks later, Netflix filled that space with a cast list and a production start.
The numbers explain why Netflix never let the renewal lapse, even as it gathered dust. According to Variety, the first season tallied 125 million hours viewed in its first week on the service and climbed to 148 million hours in its second. It spent five weeks on the Netflix global Top 10 for English language television, while reaching the Top 10 in more than 90 countries. Critics were cooler, with the show landing at 56 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 54 on Metacritic. Variety’s own reviewer, Daniel D’Addario, called it “ultimately unremarkable fiction.” Audiences, in other words, watched a show that critics shrugged at, and kept watching all the way to the end.
Part of the pull was that the story was loosely true, or at least true enough to make the hair stand up. The series grew out of Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 article for New York magazine’s The Cut, “The Haunting of a Dream House.” It followed Derek and Maria Broaddus, who began receiving threatening letters after they bought 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey, in 2014, never moved in, and finally sold the house in 2019. Murphy and Brennan folded in another piece of Westfield history, modeling the character John Graff on John List, the accountant who murdered his family in his Westfield home in 1971. The real letter writer has never been identified and no charges were ever filed, and that gap is the engine of the whole show.
The first season leaned into that gap rather than closing it, and its ending is the main reason a second season makes sense at all. Theodora Birch, the private investigator played by Noma Dumezweni, confessed on her deathbed to being The Watcher, only for her daughter to reveal at the funeral that she had lied to give Dean some peace. The Brannocks sold the house to Nora’s old friend Karen Calhoun, played by Jennifer Coolidge, who promptly found a Watcher letter of her own. The family retreated to a New York apartment. Then Dean drove back to 657 Boulevard, introduced himself to the new owner as “John,” and lied to Nora about where he had been without knowing that Nora was watching him.
That final scene points the story straight back at the Brannocks, which helps explain why Netflix is leading with Watts and Cannavale rather than recasting the show as an anthology, an option ScreenRant floated last month. Not everyone made the trip, though. Luke David Blumm, who played the couple’s son Carter, was not on Netflix’s list, and Deadline described the character as missing in action. Coolidge, Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney, who played the strange Winslow siblings next door, have not been mentioned. Mo’s return is the most interesting choice, since Martindale’s character was at the center of some of the season’s wildest red herrings. Bringing her back might be a hint that the neighbors are not finished with the Brannocks either.
Behind the camera, the producing team is built largely from names that were there the first time, which suggests continuity was the point. Murphy, Brennan and Dorsey are joined by Nissa Diederich, Karl Frankenfield, Scott Robertson, Todd Kubrak, Tanase Popa, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Eric Newman and Bryan Unkeless, and Watts herself, who produces as well as stars. The first season was split among several directors, including Murphy, Paris Barclay, Jennifer Lynch and Max Winkler, and it shot its version of 657 Boulevard at a private home in Rye, New York, built only in 2016. Naming Dorsey as the season’s director from the outset, even if other names end up on individual episodes, gives it a clearer visual identity on paper. That is not nothing for a show that sometimes felt like several shows stitched together.
Meanwhile, the project that kept Murphy and Brennan busy has become one of Netflix’s biggest franchises. TheWrap reports that “Monster” has passed 320 million views across its four seasons, and Deadline notes that “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” still sits on Netflix’s list of its most popular English language series. The latest installment, “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,” has held the No. 1 spot on the global Top 10 for English television since its September 17th premiere, with 26.6 million views so far. Having that kind of anthology running in the background frees Brennan to treat “The Watcher” as a single story again, rather than a format to be stretched.
There is still no premiere date, and Netflix has not given a window. Deadline expects the season to be released next year, which would leave a five-year gap between the two seasons’ debuts, short of the six-year record for an American series held by HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” though that is the trade’s estimate rather than Netflix’s word. TheWrap, for its part, reports that cameras rolled on Friday, while Variety, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter all describe the shoot as starting this fall. Either way, the second season of “The Watcher” is no longer a renewal on paper, and for a show whose fans spent four years refreshing their feeds for news, that is the part that matters.
The harder question is whether the audience is still waiting at the door. Variety raised it directly, noting that it “remains to be seen” whether the show can repeat its first run, “particularly given recent reports on Netflix shows losing significant viewership between their first and second seasons.” A thriller built on a real mystery that was never solved also has a narrow path to walk, because it has to keep the dread going without promising an answer the true story cannot give. The cast and the creators are the right ones for the job, and Martindale alone is worth the price of a subscription, but five years is a long time to ask anyone to stand at the mailbox, and the second season will probably have to win its viewers back from scratch.
What Do You Think? Are you still invested in the Brannocks after four years, or has “The Watcher” missed its moment? Should the second season finally name The Watcher, or keep the mystery alive the way the real case has? And who from the first season would you most like to see back on Boulevard?
See you on the next binge!
