ITV has announced that it’s giving a third season to Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall’s dour-but-popular crime drama centered on the murder of a young boy in a small British town. The announcement comes in the wake of the show’s second season finale, which aired in the U.K. Monday night. (BBC America will begin airing the show’s second series Stateside on March 4.)
Chibnall has said in the past that he envisioned the show as a trilogy—although, to be clear, no one at ITV has said anything about this third series being the show’s last. The show’s first season (remade for U.S. audiences s Gracepoint) centered on the death of young Danny Lattimer, and its investigation by chipper police detective Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) and her world-weary superior, DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant and his beard of sorrow). The second season focused on the trial of Danny’s murderer, while delving into the past case that made Hardy so weary of the world. No details have been released about the direction of Broadchurch’s next season, but given Chibnall and Tennant’s associations with a certain, very lucrative British franchise, the path seems obvious: An abandonment of the show’s almost soap-like serial structure in favor of Miller and Hardy, bouncing through time, solving history’s greatest unsolved child murders and quipping relentlessly in the face of almost unimaginable grief and sorrow.