Stephen King's Welcome To Derry Can Last Forever After Switching Casts

Published Aug 20, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

Casey Duby is an avid TV writer, watcher, and reviewer. She graduated from Emerson College in 2021 with a focus in Writing for Film and Television, where she wrote several pilots and watched countless more. She's been working in television ever since.

Casey loves thoughtful content that makes her ponder our world and the people in it, and she's learned that any genre can surprise her. With favorites in every genre from horror to politics, family to action, nothing is off limits.

Casey has experience working in TV development and writing scripted shows. Currently working as a Writer/Critic in Los Angeles, with an AMC A-List membership to boot, she is always hunting for the next good story and great theme song.

In October 2025, the minds behind the films It and It: Chapter Two expanded their reimagining of Stephen King's iconic novel to television. The lengthy book features a sprawling timeline and rich history of Derry, Maine, that the movies didn't fully explore. In its first season, It: Welcome to Derry proved to be a necessary addition to the franchise, even becoming HBO Max's third-largest original series launch.

A prequel to the movies, Welcome to Derry season 1 was set in 1962 and followed a new group of kids plagued by Pennywise the Dancing Clown, including a young Will Hanlon, the future father of the Losers' Club's Mike Hanlon.

Welcome to Derry smoothly handles the changes that It and It: Chapter Two made to the novel's timeline, fleshing out the chronology of the events in this on-screen iteration. In King's book, which was released in 1986, the main story of the young Losers' Club's first major encounter with Pennywise occurred in 1957-58, with their adult return to Derry taking place in 1984.

The films wisely modernized this timeline to capture a more relevant, contemporary sense of nostalgia. The 2017 It movie was set in 1988-89, while Chapter Two took place in the near present. The movies told a complete, classic-feeling story of the Losers' Club relevant to a modern audience, but King's novel featured more in-depth history and lineage that goes back several decades into Derry's past.

Welcome to Derry season 1 began to bridge the gap between the novel's untold stories and the movies' bumped-up timelines, working the childhood experiences of Derry's previous generation into its 1962 storyline. However, the show's work is far from over, as its handling of time has created near-limitless potential for Welcome to Derry season 2 and beyond.

It: Welcome To Derry Could Go On Forever After Season 2

It: Welcome to Derry season 2 is set to take place in 1935, promising another aesthetic and tone shift from season 1 and both movies. With this, the show has already established a format in which every season travels backward in time to tell the story of a previous generation's struggles with Pennywise, an entity that lies dormant for 27 years before reawakening to eat more children.

Additionally, the Derry history detailed in King's novel goes back even further than the stories told in Welcome to Derry's 1962 saga, giving the show plenty more canon material to unpack. Seeds have already been planted for at least two more of Pennywise's cycles of violence, which typically culminate in one major mass casualty event, like season 1's tragic fire at the Black Spot.

Flashbacks in Welcome to Derry season 1 and easter eggs in its title sequence have alluded to similar plans for adapting the novel's stories to fit the on-screen timeline. Season 2's 1935 story will follow the Bradley Gang's arrival in Derry, while a potential season 3 storyline has already been set up with flashbacks to Pennywise's origins in 1908 and references to the Kitchener Ironworks explosion.

Even once the show fleshes out all the history detailed in King's It, both the novel and the films have established that Pennywise's presence in Derry is almost as ancient as humanity itself, meaning that, theoretically, Welcome to Derry could continue to unspool Derry's history in reverse order for many seasons to come.

With Time, It: Welcome To Derry Will Become The Perfect Period Piece

It: Welcome to Derry season 1 will have been a welcome installment for fans of the novel's lore or original '50s-era setting, while season 2 promises more of a Western flair with bank robbers and shootouts against the backdrop of the Great Depression. As the show goes on, each season will offer satisfaction for period piece fans of every era.

The 27-year gap and fresh cast also suggest that each season will largely be able to be enjoyed on its own, with the throughline being Pennywise and, for detail-oriented fans, the comprehensive history of Derry, Maine, that will grow more thorough with each season.

As new seasons allow the show to straddle the line between an anthology and a serialized TV drama, It: Welcome to Derry will only become more satisfying to fans of horror, historical fiction, and Stephen King alike.

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  Charlotte Hanlon

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  Jovan Adepo

  Leroy Hanlon