'Lethal Weapon' showrunner reveals plans for Season 2: 'We're going to blow it up'
Season 1 of Lethal Weapon ended with Riggs (Clayne Crawford) hot on the trail of the man who killed his wife. But seeing as how that man is Mexican drug kingpin Tito Flores (Danny Mora), does that mean this year will take place entirely south of the border? And what happens if and when Riggs finally does set things right?
In advance of tonight’s return, showrunner Matt Miller took a group of journalists around the set on the Warner Bros. lot and gave some insight into how the show is made and what we can look forward to in the second season.
“So much of Season 1 was driven by this guy being broken because of the death of his wife and Murtaugh pulling him out of that,” Miller said. “But we told so much of that story in Season 1, a whole Season 2 of a guy sitting in his trailer and spinning the revolver and wanting to kill himself — we needed to see this guy evolve. But that said, we don’t want a totally sane Riggs, which is no fun anyway!”
Riggs will eventually get closure with the death of his wife, but it turns out that’s not the only reason why he acts as he does. “If you remember, in the Christmas episode last year where he first met Miranda — it was a flashback where he was sitting alone in a bar for Christmas and he met her and everything went well. But the idea of a guy who’s sitting alone in a bar at Christmas is a symptom of some loneliness and some damage that came before Miranda,” he insisted.
All of which is to say, Riggs won’t be moving in next door to the Murtaugh family with a wife and 2.4 kids anytime soon. “No matter what, Riggs is never going to be healed and never going to be normal,” Miller said. “We start to get into some stuff that happened in his childhood and some trauma through flashbacks — and even some stuff that happens in present day — that leads us to realize that he’s never going to fix this stuff.”
Expect an emotional roller coaster. “We have a lot of episodes that are fun and light and we’re like, ‘Riggs is back, he’s better!’ Then the rug gets pulled out from under him and he gets darker. Then he goes even darker, then we pull him back out, and then it goes even darker. And that’s the show,” Miller said with a laugh.
The push/pull of light and dark is the central dynamic of Lethal Weapon and, of course, that extends to the homes of Riggs and Murtaugh. “Part of the conception of the reboot,” Miller said, “was to make it a little bit of wish fulfillment with [the Murtaugh] house. Whereas Riggs lives in squalor, getting drunk in his little place, it’s about juxtaposing the two lives of the guys. One guy lives in a trailer with nothing and gets drunk all day, and the other guy lives in this big, beautiful house with his wonderful family and the white picket fence.”
But don’t get too attached to that big beautiful house. In the fifth episode, the city confiscates Riggs’s trailer and, according to Miller, he “ends up getting very drunk and stealing his truck from the city impound and driving it to the Murtaughs and crashing it into their backyard.”
Not only that: “We’re doing an episode for Christmas where [the house] kind of gets destroyed a little,” Miller revealed. “We’re going to blow it up — not blow it up completely, but…” So save your screenshots now: That white picket fence may soon be on fire.
Season 2 of Lethal Weapon premieres Sept. 26 at 8 p.m. on Fox.
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