Spoilers for The Girlfriend ahead.
If you're reading this, you've binged all six episodes of The Girlfriend on Prime Video faster than the speed of light. The adaptation feels even darker and more explicit than Michelle Frances' original novel, and frankly, it's a heady watch that we don't want to stop experiencing. But what if I told you that we might not have to?
Granted, Amazon sold us the TV show as a six part limited series, but as rival Netflix likes to let us know, that's not always fixed. But surely episode 6's finale means we won't be seeing The Girlfriend again, right? Laura (Robin Wright) ends up dying in the family pool held by son Daniel (Laurie Davidson), only realizing what might have happened too late.
We see a pregnant Cherry (Olivia Cooke) smiling at him in the garden while Daniel watches a video on Laura's phone – it's of Cherry's mother warning Laura about exactly what her daughter is capable of. In fact, her last words were: "She'll get rid of you somehow."
It's a chilling parting of words, and with Laura now well and truly out of the picture, the cat-and-mouse dynamic we've watched is no more. But when I caught up with the show's producers, Andy Serkis (yes, that precious one) and Jonathan Cavendish, the one sticking point for The Girlfriend season 2 to happen is completely different.
The Girlfriend season 2 could come to Prime Video 'if Amazon wants to' despite finale
"We decided – and this wasn't our original thing – that we'd love to do a second season if Amazon wanted to," Cavendish tells me. "Season 2 could really go at the same story told in a different way."
How likely does it seem that Amazon would commission a second season? It's not impossible. If The Girlfriend's first 28 days of viewing figures are impressive enough, there will definitely be enough value in the streamer investing in more episodes, and it wouldn't be the first time a limited series became strictly unlimited.
But I think back to my time as a scriptwriting master's degree student while Cavendish talks. Whenever you pitch an ideal for a TV show, it's essentially standard practice to prove it can be "returnable" (i.e. return for more than one season). The more you can prove this, the more likely you are to get something made.
So, did the idea for season 2 come from a need to make The Girlfriend returnable? "It didn't put us off at all," Cavendish says of the Prime Video show being a limited series. "It's six episodes, and we quite like making films and TV shows where that length of story is a natural fit.
"But also the world is so extraordinary. The series ends on one of the greatest 'Oh God' moments possible."
Serkis adds: "And there are so many great parts in this. That's really the main reason we wanted to work on the project. The two points of view, the twists and turns, it's just such an extraordinary piece of writing. When we first came across it, we knew that this was one of those things that we wanted... it feels like the cast is owning a story."
Do I think The Girlfriend season 2 should exist? No. But if a sequel or spinoff could convince me otherwise, than never say never to streaming something new.
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