The Terminal List Is Officially Changing Genres In Season 2

EXCLUSIVE: Chris Pratt's The Terminal List is changing genres in season 2.

After a gap of more than three years, The Terminal List is returning to Prime Video on Wednesday, October 21, with eight new episodes. They put Pratt's James Reece in the path of a global conspiracy that may hit close to home. But although there will undoubtedly be new villains and new bits of lore to unlock, the creative team behind the hit action thriller series is previewing a different take.

In an interview with ScreenRant's Liam Crowley, showrunner and executive producer David DiGilio was asked if The Terminal List's new globe-trotting approach signaled a genre shift compared to season 1. DiGilio responded that it did feel like a change. The showrunner added that the changes are reminiscent of what author Jack Carr had done in the Terminal List books, but acknowledged that the alterations and shifts would be more difficult to pull off in a continuous television series.

In the quote below, DiGilio mentions the Dark Wolf spinoff and how that helped to set the stage for The Terminal List's change. He also specifically mentioned that the story begins to move away from Reece's personal quest for vengeance into more of a “psychological thriller” focused on Reece's quest to find Mo Farooq:

Yeah, and it's something that Jack had done in the books, and we knew it would always be a bit of a tap dance to take a TV show that was so associated with one genre and then shift it into another. To be honest, it's one of the reasons that Dark Wolf was our first spinoff. Ben Edwards' time inside the CIA, inside Brown Branch, got us into Jack Carr as this globetrotting espionage thriller universe. That was your taste of that transition. He had always written this book to be a moment where James Reese moves out of this deeply personal quest for vengeance and this kind of psychological thriller into this globetrotting search for someone he had worked with, Mo Farooq. You've seen that in the materials and the trailers. Reese is really the only person who knows Mo well enough and who has the ability to think where Mo might be, where he might be going. He becomes part of this machine with the CIA, with special operations, with the very things that had turned against him, and he has to learn if he can trust that machine, that organization again.

Carr, the author of the Terminal List books and an executive producer on the Prime Video Original, also weighed in on his experience of writing True Believer. The novel serves as the basis for season 2, with Carr explaining that he deliberately moved away from the debutnovel's revenge-driven storyline, and instead favored the path of examining Reece's potential redemption. He noted that Prime Video was supportive of the changes, including the first two episodes providing a relative respite before the larger international mystery:

Oh yeah. I wanted to do that. That was very intentional in that I didn't want to do something that was just, oh, you know what he did? He just wrote the same book, but he dropped it in an international setting or something like that. I wanted to make sure that I did something different enough in that second book that would really differentiate me as an author as well. I took that risk of having the first third of the book be this journey where James Reese starts learning to live again, thinking he's going to die still though, and then he gets to Mozambique and then he really gets to put these skills that he learned in the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to use in a positive way, combating the poaching problem in Mozambique.

I wanted to do that so that the reader and I, as the writer, could get to know James Reese now as he moves from just the first book, where it's a book about revenge without constraint. The second one really is a story of violent redemption. I always have a theme that I'm writing. I write it on a yellow sticky and I put it right here on the computer and that guides the writing process. I always come back to that either directly or indirectly as I'm writing. That was something that I did very intentionally in the book. And I thought my editor, because I was very new to publishing, I thought they might just say, "Hey, why don't you take out the first third of this book and just start it in Mozambique and say he got there when he's coming up over the beach or something." And they let me take that risk. And that was very cool of the publisher to do that. I have a hundred percent complete creative control with my publisher. That's pretty cool because also it's all on me. If it works or not, there's no one to blame but myself, which is a very different thing than screenwriting and production, where it's such a team effort, but everybody has the same goal to make the best product possible, the best TV show we possibly can. We got to do that in the show as well. Amazon let us take those risks and have a first episode that's a journey across the ocean and a second episode that's in Mozambique. And then boom, we really get into the international thriller aspect of it.

The Terminal List season 2 does indeed find Pratt’s character in search of a new sense of purpose after completing his list. He gets exactly that chance when the CIA closes in on him. To clear his name, he must “stop a resurgent terrorist group that has turned a former ally to their cause.” In the process, the eight episodes span the globe. It goes from Moscow to Langley. But perhaps most troublingly of all, there's an element that touches Reece’s family history.

Tom Hopper, Constance Wu, Dar Salim, Luke Hemsworth, Gabriel Luna, Costa Ronin, Olga Kurylenko, Yul Vazquez, Martin Sensmeier, Arnold Vosloo, Jeremy Bobb, and Shiraz Tzarfati are among those joining season 2, along with Caitlin Bassett and Edwin Hodge. They'll be stepping into what sounds like a different kind of action thriller, which may fare better overall.

The Terminal List season 1 holds a 42% score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 57 reviews, with the tone of critics being generally lukewarm to negative despite praise for Pratt's performance. The audience score swings wildly in the opposite direction. It has a 94% score based on more than 5000 submitted user ratings. It'll be interesting to see how both sides, critics and audiences, respond to the changes after the three-year gap.

The Terminal List season 2 will debut all eight episodes will stream Wednesday, October 21 on Prime Video.