Prime Video‘s ragtag team of community paybackers, known affectionately as The Outlaws, gear up for an all-new adventure in Bristol as their Season 2 plan to frame the ruthless drug lord known as The Dean (Claes Bang) backfires.
“We’re picking up about six months after the previous series,” creator, director, writer, and star Stephen Merchant tells TV Insider about the action. “This group of relatively ordinary people have [sent The Dean] to court and he’s awaiting trial, but there’s now a threat that he might get off by corrupting the case.”
When shoplifter Rani (Rhianne Barreto) shows up with a dead body in the back of her car though, moving on with their lives is next to impossible. “They’re dragged back into the thriller story that they thought they’d escaped,” Merchant says of the community payback group. As fans will recall from past seasons, these low-grade criminals find themselves banded together when they get wrapped up in a conspiracy while serving community payback hours in Bristol.
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Until now, most of their involvement in the larger conspiracy at play has merely involved drugs and money, but adding a dead body into the mix was something Merchant was excited to try. “That was chiefly because I love anything when someone shows up with a dead body. And when I walked into the writers’ room, I’m like, ‘All I know is in this series, someone’s going to show up with a dead body.’”
As Merchant puts it, “The idea in the original series was to have these seven people who’ve done minor crimes but are not criminals fundamentally, and for them to slowly slip into a much more dangerous, morally compromising world.” Adding a dead body really ups the ante. “The natural extension of that slow questioning of their moral compass is to introduce a dead body. And they do debate whether they should go to the police, but the problem is that it will open up a whole can of worms that will put them in trouble.”
Among the payback group is Merchant’s nerdy lawyer Greg. He previews a completely new living situation. “Greg is seemingly kind of settled into a sort of domestic situation, but that, unfortunately, doesn’t pan out as he’d hoped and combined with the fact that this new burden of the dead body and being sucked back into the crime and the pressure of that begins to weigh on him heavily,” he teases.
Related‘The Outlaws’ Season 3: Everything We Know
This dead body also puts a wedge between him and his platonic roommate and former community payback participant Lady Gabby (Eleanor Tomlinson). “It fractures his relationship with Lady Gabby,” Merchant teases, but it’s not all gloom and doom as Greg’s time for a win has also arrived. “I did want to see that character be good at something because he’s always been slightly hopeless and a bit incompetent, and he’s a lawyer, we’ve never seen him in court, so it’s important to me in this series that you actually saw him in court,” Merchant teases.
This comes in the form of a face-off with Lady Gabby’s father, played by returning guest star Richard E. Grant. “There’s a scene where Greg stands up and says ‘objection.’ And the judge has to point out that we don’t say ‘objection’ in U.K. courts. That’s very much an American tradition, which is something I didn’t know until we researched it and a lawyer had to tell me that,” Merchant says with a laugh.
“And so Greg, as naive as he’s about how the court system… you at least get to see him in court and trying to do his job well.” Will he usher in success? Tune into The Outlaws when it drops on Prime Video this May.
The Outlaws, Season 3 Premiere, Friday, May 31, Prime Video
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