Prodigal Son: 5 Things We Wish We’d Gotten to See Before It Was Cancelled
There’s one thing noticeably missing from Fox’s current slate of scripted shows, and that would be a little Whitly family dysfunction.
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The network’s psychological thriller Prodigal Son was cancelled in May 2021 after just two seasons, disappointing fans and, notably, cast member Lou Diamond Phillips. Plus, the Season 2 finale ended on a whopper of a cliffhanger: Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen) attempted to kill his son Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne), by whom he was feeling betrayed, but Malcolm managed to grab the knife and drive it into his father’s stomach, leaving Martin’s fate unclear as he bled out in the woods.
At the time that Prodigal Son‘s series finale aired, co-creators Chris Fedak and Sam Sklaver were reluctant to share their ideas for a potential third season, as there was hope for the show to be saved by another network. But the rescue unfortunately never came, leaving us to hypothesize about what might have happened if the series came back — and we certainly know what we’d like to have seen.
Keep scrolling for our Prodigal Son Season 3 wish list, then drop a comment with your own contributions!
A Surgeon for ‘The Surgeon,’ Stat!
We don’t want to give the impression here that we champion serial killers. But, look, we can’t pretend we’d be nearly as interested in a version of Prodigal Son that didn’t include Martin Whitly. Sheen brought a delicious campiness to the character while keeping him a believably fearsome tormentor for Malcolm, and the series would have been markedly less entertaining without him around. So, no matter how plausible it might have been from a medical standpoint, we would have preferred to see Martin survive that gnarly stabbing — and we weren’t alone, either.
“On a technical level, our plan was to include Michael Sheen in Season 3, so that gives you a little bit of insight into where we were going,” Fedak told TVLine after the finale, with Sklaver adding, “Take what you will from this, but it was something we were very interested in pushing further in Season 3, just getting Martin out of Claremont [Psychiatric Hospital] more and giving this complex character even more dimensions.”
Dani + Bright = ???
Those who ‘shipped Bright with his NYPD colleague Dani Powell (Aurora Perrineau) had their patience rewarded near the end of Season 2, when the pair finally kissed (even though the brightness on that scene could have been dialed way up; give the people what they want!). But nothing halts a burgeoning romance in its tracks quite like watching your beau-to-be stab his own father, eh? Dani was appropriately horrified when she spotted the aftermath of the stabbing, and Sklaver hinted that Bright and Dani were “not going to be able to get past this.” But even if Dani and Bright took a long time to get back to normal — if they ever could, that is — it’s disappointing to have been robbed of that emotionally complex journey.
Get It, Gil and Jessica!
Meanwhile, in slightly more stable relationship news, Gil (Lou Diamond Phillips) and Jessica’s (Bellamy Young) will-they-won’t-they situationship ended in an encouraging place. “I want to see some things in my life a little more clearly,” Jessica told Gil at the end of the finale, acknowledging that she needed to work on her painkiller reliance. On a show like Prodigal Son, a romance between an emotionally stunted woman and the NYPD officer who once arrested her serial killer ex-husband is probably the most functional relationship we’re going to get, and even Phillips wanted it to go there. In a 2022 interview with TVLine, Phillips divulged that Season 3 would have explored Jessica and Gil’s spark more, as well as “the complications that [Gil and Jessica’s romance] would bring to Malcolm and Gil’s relationship.”
A Bright-Less Future for Edrisa
Near the end of Prodigal Son‘s sophomore season, we took the show to task a bit (with love!) for its handling of Edrisa’s (Keiko Agena) crush on Bright, which morphed from an innocuous recurring bit into something off-putting and needlessly humiliating for Edrisa. Fortunately, Season 2 did enrich Edrisa’s backstory a bit, introducing her love of web-sleuthing and hinting at a non-Bright love interest for her. But we can’t help craving more formal closure on that storyline: Bright and Edrisa were certainly capable of having a mature, candid conversation about their respective feelings (or lack thereof, on Bright’s part), making way for what could have been one of TV’s most enjoyable platonic friendships.
All of the Flashbacks, Please!
Prodigal Son always enjoyed a good flashback, particularly in Season 1, as Bright pieced together some unresolved trauma from his childhood. Had the show continued, though, it would have been fun to fill even more gaps in Malcolm and sister Ainsley’s (Halston Sage) life, including their adolescence and early adulthood. Heck, we didn’t even need the Whitlys front and center: According to Phillips, potential Season 3 flashbacks would have featured Gil’s late wife, Jackie, to illustrate “Gil’s pain, his loyalty and his devotion — the things that make him such a compassionate boss.” Just imagine the not-quite-right wigs and de-aging choices we could have been gifted! And now we’re bummed all over again.
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