MGM+ has confirmed that cameras are rolling in Serbia on the second season of its Robin Hood, and the newly announced casting tells you exactly what kind of season this is going to be. The show is scaling up from a regional power struggle to a national one, dragging the actual crowned heads of twelfth-century England directly into Sherwood. If the first season was about a forester’s son against a sheriff, the second is shaping up to be about a kingdom tearing itself apart.
The Show That Was Better Than It Had to Be
A quick reset for anyone who skipped it. When MGM+ launched this Robin Hood in November, the expectations were low, because the world does not obviously need another version of this story. What arrived instead was a pleasant surprise. It shot to number one on the UK trending charts, drew comparisons to Robin of Sherwood, the beloved 1980s version that genre fans still hold up as the gold standard, and got called an unexpected delight by critics who came in braced for the worst.
The reinvention was the smart part. This is not the Errol Flynn story of tights and merry pranks. It reframes the legend as a raw account of conquest and occupation, set after the Norman invasion, with Rob recast as a displaced Saxon driven to banditry by land theft and famine. Sean Bean anchored the whole thing as a Sheriff of Nottingham written against type, less a mustache-twirling villain than a calculating statesman who genuinely believes Norman law must be preserved at any cost. Handing Bean a morally legible tyrant with a real point of view was the show’s masterstroke, and it is a large part of why the thing worked.
The New Blood Is Royalty
The season two additions escalate the political stakes considerably, and they come with a wrinkle worth noticing.
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James Purefoy joins as King Henry, described as a ruthless monarch whose vision for England sets the season in motion. Purefoy is a tremendous get, an actor who can play magnetic menace in his sleep, and a king at the center of the board changes the entire game. Colin O’Donoghue, best known as Hook from Once Upon a Time, comes aboard as Prince Richard, Henry’s heir, whose fate the announcement says could tip the realm into civil war. And Luke Roberts plays Amaury D’Montfort, an ambitious Norman noble maneuvering for control of Nottingham.
Here is the wrinkle. The first season established the Sheriff as a cousin to Henry II and set its action against the backdrop of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court intrigues. A King Henry whose heir is a Prince Richard poised to trigger a war of succession is the show pulling the Angevin royal family, Henry II, Eleanor, and their famously fractious sons, further into the foreground. That real history is a bottomless well of betrayal, because the sons of Henry II spent their lives in open rebellion against their father and each other. If the writers are drawing on that, and it certainly looks like they are, they have chosen some of the most dramatically loaded material in all of English history. It is essentially Succession with broadswords, and it actually happened.
The People Behind It
The creative team returns intact, which matters for a show whose tone was its biggest asset. John Glenn, of SEAL Team, is back as showrunner, with Jonathan English directing and Todd Lieberman of Hidden Pictures executive producing. The production is once again shooting in Serbia, which gave the first season its convincingly muddy, lived-in medieval texture, all oppressive stone and bustling market squares rather than the clean fantasy version of the Middle Ages.
The returning ensemble, presumably including Bean’s Sheriff, Jack Patten’s Rob, and Lauren McQueen’s Marian, will now have to navigate a court packed with kings and princes, which is a promising place to put a band of outlaws who started the story worried about a single corrupt lawman.
The Legend Endures Because It Bends
Here is what a season like this proves about the material itself. Robin Hood is one of the most durable stories in the English language precisely because it has almost no fixed canon. It has been a swashbuckling romance, a children’s cartoon with a fox, a gritty Kevin Costner epic, and now a grounded occupation drama, and it survives every reinvention because the core, the little guy stealing back what the powerful took, never stops being relevant.
We keep a soft spot here for the 1938 Errol Flynn version, which remains the definitive screen Robin Hood and one of the most purely joyful adventure films ever made. The MGM+ series is the near-opposite of that in tone, trading Technicolor exuberance for grim political realism, and the fact that both approaches can coexist under the same title is the whole point. This is a story with enough room in it for everyone.
Season two is filming now, with premiere details to be announced. On the evidence of a first season that overdelivered and a second that just recruited a king, this reimagining has earned the benefit of the doubt.
