Wild Cards Renewed for Season 2 at The CW
The CW is keeping Max Mitchell and Cole Ellis on the case, renewing Wild Cards for a second season, TVLine has learned.
Season 2 will span 13 episodes — up from the 10 of Season 1 — and will premiere in 2025. (See The CW’s full Fall 2024 schedule here.)
Season-to-date, Wild Cards averaged 892,000 total viewers and a 0.1 demo rating (with Live+7 playback). Out of the eight new or acquired dramas The CW has aired this TV season, it trailed only the now-cancelled Walker in total audience and ranked No. 3 in the demo.
A co-production with Canada’s CBC Television, the romantic procedural stars Vanessa Morgan (Riverdale) as Max, a con artist who finds herself unexpectedly solving crimes alongside demoted detective Cole, played by Giacomo Gianniotti (Grey’s Anatomy). Fifth Season handles international distribution on the series.
“We are thrilled to order a second season of The CW’s breakout series Wild Cards,” said Liz Wise Lyall, head of scripted programming at The CW. “Wild Cards has clearly captured the imagination of our viewers thanks to exhilarating storytelling and the crackling chemistry between Vanessa and Giacomo. We are confident Wild Cards is the kind of smart and sexy blue-sky drama that could continually build its audience for years.”
Wild Cards‘ 10-episode first season ended with Max and Ellis nabbing a high-profile smuggler, earning Max her freedom, Ellis his job back, and a massively reduced prison sentence for Max’s father, played by Jason Priestley (Beverly Hills, 90210). But that’s actually an oversimplification of the finale’s events. The smuggler also happened to be Max’s estranged husband Olivier, and Ellis discovered that this was all part of Max’s plan from the beginning, including swapping the treasure with a fake and skipping town.
But one last bombshell reveal sent Max running back to her former (and perhaps future?) partner — she knows who killed his brother.
“I hope [the killer is] Curtis Moorfield, the basketball player we met in Episode 2, because that would bring my boyfriend back to set,” Morgan told TVLine of the character played by her real-life boyfriend James Karnik. “I was like, ‘Babe, if you were the killer, you’d come back and be with me!’”
As for where Max and Ellis stand as we head into Wild Cards‘ second season, Morgan says, “Max does genuinely care about him. The fact that she even went back [proves that]. She was supposed to be on a plane. She could have been halfway around the world by then. But she came back to tell him who killed his brother. A person with no feelings for someone wouldn’t risk their life and risk getting arrested to tell that information. So we’ll see what happens.”
Wild Cards‘ renewal comes on the heels of some disappointing news at The CW: Jared Padalecki’s Walker has been cancelled after four seasons, while Canadian series The Spencer Sisters will not be back for Season 2.
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2024 Renewal and Cancellation Scorecard
