David Oyelowo and the 'Bass Reeves' Showrunner Seem to Disagree on a Second Season

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 20, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 20, 2023 |

The finale of Lawmen: Bass Reeves aired this week, and though the series started strong, it floundered as it continued, eventually petering out with an anticlimactic shootout with the season’s big bad. Besides being a disappointing final episode, it also left open a lot of unresolved storylines, which left me wondering if the series would return to answer them in a second season or if, for instance, we’ll never find out what happens between Reeves’ daughter and her boyfriend, a fairly substantial subplot in the series.

It’s not clear from the finale itself whether it would continue, but showrunner Chad Feehan told The Wrap that he has left open the possibility:

If David’s game, I would love to do another season. I intentionally left some meat on the bone in case we got to this point. Bass’s life is so incredible and it’s so expansive, there is no way that we could hit every major benchmark in his life in 8 or 10 hours or else it would’ve felt almost like a procedural.

Specifically, Feehan noted that there were a couple of storylines he could follow, including the time that Bass Reeves arrested his own son for murder — he made the arrest to ensure that his son wouldn’t otherwise be killed during the arrest. Feehan also suggested that Reeves had a lifelong relationship with a Black outlaw named Bob Dozier that might be worth exploring.

Alas, in an interview with EW, David Oyelowo — who plays Bass Reeves — does not seem as open to the possibility of a second season. He’s happy with where the season ended.

We played a lot with what the ending should be. For a moment we thought, should we keep it open-ended in case there are going to be other seasons? We ended up feeling like this should be an anthology. The idea is to now go forward and explore other lawmen whose stories we should know, but don’t … When we hit that decision, it felt right to put a button to the Bass Reeves story. This is a guy who had a 32-year career. You want to hint at the fact that there is a future for him, but for our story, this hopefully is a satisfying conclusion of getting a taste of who Bass Reeves is.

Oyelowo suggested in the same interview that it was a difficult show not just to get made but to shoot. “We shot on old plantations that felt like they had ghosts of the past on there, which was debilitating in relation to the subject matter,” he told the publication.

In other words, Oyelowo seems to answer the question of whether “David is game.” He is not. While another season of Lawmen is likely in the cards, more Bass Reeves probably is not.

Source: The Wrap & EW