Cynics will likely take note that the second season of “The Killing” (AMC, 8 p.m.) occurs on April Fools Day.
Some viewers felt like they were fooled when the first season ended minus a resolution to the season-long case investigating the murder of a teenager.
The backlash caused the network AMC to go into a defensive mode and a definitive promise aobut the series going forth.
“We learned a lot from your response to season one,” AMC programming chief Joel Stillerman told writers at the TV Critics Association winter press tour earlier this year. “We heard you, and we clearly didn’t sufficiently manage expectations.”
Some thought he was kidding when he declared, though, that “the killer will be revealed in the season two finale.”
But maybe people shouldn’t have been so prised at what did or didn’t lappen, he said. AMC’s two seasons are “taken directly from the very successful Danish series, which also ended season one with a cliffhanger and solved the murder at the end of season two.
But, he added, “after we saw the reaction,” he said the network “potentially explored veering away from the Danish template. We looked at all our options and thought about whether we could conclude the story early in the season or at other points, but at the end of the day and after some significant discussion, we decided that in order to do justice to the story that we fell in love with in the first place, a very multi layered and complex story, resolving the murder at the end of season two was the best creative plan.”
Then, as in the Danish series, a new crime would be investigated.