The 'Ten Days In The Valley' Creator Has Big Plans For A Potential Season 2

If you're a fan of ABC's new Kyra Sedgwick mystery series… well, first of all, congratulations on being one of the few and the proud. Secondly, you're probably wondering about the fate of the show as it approaches its Season 1 finale. Will Ten Days In The Valley return for Season 2? That's a question that shouldn't be taken for granted, since the show has infamously struggled since being given a primo 10:00 p.m. Sunday slot by the Alphabet network this fall.

It's a shame, considering that the underrated TV show is one of the few offerings of the season that was created by a woman (Tassie Cameron, Degrassi: The Next Generation). The drama, which stars Sedgwick (the Emmy winning star of The Closer) as a television producer whose daughter is kidnapped, got off to a rough start, with 3.4 million viewers tuning into the series premiere on Oct. 1.

From there, the show shed almost a full million of those viewers between the premiere and the second episode, making it the lowest-rated show of the Fall 2017 season thus far, and leaving TV prognostication website TV By The Numbers to declare that the ABC series was "likely to be cancelled" after only two weeks. The network "won't spend more than ten days in the valley," the site joked.

Indeed, after having aired only four of its intended 10 episodes, Ten Days In The Valley (also executive produced by: Dana Goldberg) was moved from its time slot, to be replaced by mainstay ABC competition series Shark Tank. Even though the network didn't release an official statement on the show's fate, TVLine reported that Ten Days had been "effectively cancelled." After remaining MIA for two months, the show returned to the air in December on Saturdays, with the latest episode attracting 1.4 million viewers. (TV By The Numbers has since downgraded Ten Days from "likely to be cancelled" to "Dead Show Walking.")

Now that I'm done raining on your parade, let me find you a sliver of hope. At the show's Tribeca Film Festival panel in September, at which Bustle was in attendance, Cameron teased the fact that Season 1 — while solving its own self-contained mystery — would gradually set up plot threads for a hypothetical second season. "If you watch the 10 episodes, you'll see, especially in the later part of the season, that there are so many different ways it could go," she said. "With the ripples of secrets, mysteries, corruption, politics, drugs … it's kind of huge, so I think there's enough that I set up that, if we were to do a second season, it would stem very organically out of the first."

If Cameron hinted at the existence of a follow-up, then her fellow producer Marcy Ross flat-out confirmed their plans for a second batch of episodes. "We're in the process of working together on Season 2, just to give ourselves and the network a sense of what Season 2 would be," Ross said. "I think it all starts with [Sedgwick's character] Jane. The onion is just beginning to peel back on who Jane is." Indeed, Season 2 would focus largely on Jane's backstory, Cameron agreed. "Jane's past is such a huge influence on who she is," the creator added, teasing that viewers could possibly "meet her mother and see that dynamic in the present" in a potential second season.

Of course, just because the writers were planning a second season back in September doesn't mean one will ever come to fruition. But Cameron assured fans that they wouldn't be left hanging in the event that Ten Days proved to be a one-and-done. "It is a satisfying 10-episode mystery, and there's no wondering who did it at the end or what happened," she promised. "I think it's very satisfying, and if [the whole show] were just 10 episodes, I think it would be a story well told."

Additional reporting by Martha Sorren.