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Making a strong first season of a TV series is one thing, but being able to come back stronger with Season 2 is a feat. Rafael Casal and co-creator Daveed Diggs have done just that with Blindspotting’s second season.
The Starz series was inspired by their 2018 film of the same name and follows the story of Miles (Casal) and Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones), a young couple raising their son Sean (Atticus Woodward) in the Bay Area. Season 1 kicked off with Miles being arrested, shifting the focus away from Miles and his friend Collin (Diggs) in the film to now centering the story on how Ashley and Miles’ family deal with life together while he is behind bars.
Miles and Ashley got married in Season 1, and now as they are closing in on a year of being apart, we see how being forced into single motherhood has affected her. Episode 1, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” directed by Casal, is brilliant. Ashley is throwing a birthday party for her son and anyone who has attended a child’s birthday party knows how hectic and overwhelming they can be—especially without a second parent to share the responsibilities with. Miles’ mom Rainey (Helen Hunt) and his little sister Trish (Jaylen Barron), as well as other family friends, have rallied around Ashley and Sean to help make the separation easier. Still, Ashley is more stressed out and short-tempered than we remember her from Season 1.
While Ashley and Miles’ relationship is still the heart of the story, Blindspotting Season 2 continues to heavily shed light on the realities of the prison industrial complex (even going as far as filming Episode 3 at San Quentin State Prison in California). It also focuses on how incarceration not only affects the imprisoned but also those who love them—and Season 2 shows how the effects linger even after they have served their time. They explore that through Earl, a neighbor and family friend who was forced to go back to prison after a work mishap caused him to miss his probation curfew.
Blindspotting is a comedy, with fantasy elements that also feel like they were crafted to take place on a theater stage. While they cover a range of incredibly serious conversations, deep emotional trauma, and the dark realities of life, it is all made easy to process through the incredible performance of each actor.
“The fun of Season 2 is now that we knew the cast better and knew what their strengths were, we could write for them. We also had a writers room that could write better for them and make sure that they were in scenes where they could improvise in the way that would be most entertaining,” Casal tells Complex. “[Season 2] is nothing but laughs. We’re cracking up all the time. And then every once in a while, it just hits you like, ‘Oh, right, this is a show about prison.’ But we try to let you forget that as much as possible, so you’re just falling in love with these people and you just want to hang out with them.”
Complex caught up with Casal ahead of Season 2, and he talked about directing a majority of the season, showing viewers more of Miles and making sure the essence and true message of the show wasn’t lost while making it even funnier and whimsical the second time around.
How are you feeling now that people are about to see Season 2?
It dropped on the streaming platform last night, so some people are getting kind of the early peak before it airs today. Today, we’re doing a big sort of community screening at the Grand Lake Theatre. That theater that’s in our opening sequence, we’re doing a big screening there. t I’m just excited to watch it on the big, big screen in my childhood favorite movie theater with all these people from Oakland and from the Bay.
As the show’s creator, what does it feel like for you to be able to share what you’ve created now in person with people and also just to hear the reactions so far?
Obviously, we make the show for everyone, and we make the show for an international audience. And we plan for everyone to enjoy it fully, but we also do the season, the whole show, with these very niche Bay Area jokes as a second layer for the home team. So they’re going to get all those jokes. We watched it at SXSW with an audience. We watched it in LA. We know it’s funny. But now, we’re about to watch it back home, and it’s going to be a whole other ball game. Because now, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. There’s a Too Short episode, and they know all the Too Short references. They get everything about it.” So that’s really exciting.
I watched Season 2 in one sitting and it felt like one beautiful, cohesive movie to me.
Oh, good. I’m so glad. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never watched it in one sitting.
Yeah. I couldn’t stop. Blindspotting started as a movie, but now the show feels like its own movie. Was that intentional in the way that you crafted each episode?
The great thing about the medium of television is it’s both long-form and short-form at the same time. You’re conceptualizing in terms of an overall story, but we can do it in these half-hour chunks. The real challenge of it is that it’s a weird amount of time. They give us eight half-hour episodes. That’s four hours. It’s longer than a movie, but it’s not quite two movies. It’s not two movies; it’s not a trilogy. And you’ve got to sort of put a little bow on it and tease people out every 30 minutes.
We try to think of it as a pretty self-contained story. I felt like Season 1 was its own thing, and Season 2 comes to a close as its own thing. We kind of talk about it in terms of at the end of every season, we close the door and we open the window. So we want to finish the house of the season, but just in case you want to look into the neighbor’s house and try to imagine what the next season’s going to be, there’s a way to go, “OK, I see where this could go if they came back.” That’s kind of how we approach it. I made a full-length movie before I ever made television, so I think a lot of those skills from making the film transfer over.
Episode 3 [titled “N*Ggaz and Jesus”] where Ashley visits Miles in prison for a weekend was beautiful.
I love that one. I love it so much. Jess Wu Calder. That’s her directorial debut. She’s the person who found me when I was 20 and asked if I wanted to write a movie. She produced the movie with her husband, Keith Calder. They produced the show with me and Daveed, and that was the first episode she ever directed of anything. Daveed and I wrote it, and that was like a crew project. That was the main squad in the show. That one is really special for us, because everyone who was a part of the original idea of making this thing, [they] were the main people putting it together. I think that’s why that episode, among other things, feels so special.
I thought, “I could see this on a theater stage.” We see a lot of plays that turn into movies or TV shows, but this feels like a TV show that could turn into a play.
Yeah, you’re totally right. There’s definitely a play about the 48 hours of visitation and what that is like for a family. And we shot it like that. We had just four days together in that little room, that little apartment. We built the inside on our set, and then we went to San Quentin [State Prison] to shoot all the outside stuff to make sure that it felt real. So when I step outside and do that look-up, that’s the real tower. That’s real. We’re deep in that prison. People are on the yard 20 feet away. It brought it home. Some of the stuff that’s coming out of us is because we’re really in that space with other people. We got in that room, because somebody who was actually doing that visitation had just finished their stay with their family.
I’ve never seen anything like that represented on TV. I didn’t know that you could even do that: You can spend 48 hours with your family.
There’s only seven prisons in the country that allow that. San Quentin’s one of them. So in the Bay, we have one of the prisons that has very progressive programs. To your point, I was like, “I don’t think people even know that this is an option.”
Miles’ mom Rainey is also dealing with her own health issues. The show doesn’t really talk about that openly, but it’s a looming cloud that’s so subtle. Can you talk about the journey that Rainey’s going through in terms of her health?
It’s right there underneath. We’ve tried to be really strategic about not having to be way up-front, because as Helen [Hunt] says a lot, you put any woman on a show over 50 and you’ve got to give them dementia or you’ve got to give them some condition that becomes the entire identity of the character. So she was really adamant, and I think we were all kind of onboard with this being a thing because it’s a real thing, and it’s a real thing that some of our parents, our family members, are going through. But it can’t be her defining factor. So you forget until something, some little thing, happens. When a parent or an aunt or somebody, a grandparent, is going through that, you do kind of forget. And then there are these moments where it hits you in the face, and you’re reminded that time is short.
Right.
So we’ll go a couple episodes and not bring it up, not have anything happen. Then it’ll just be one little [thing]. She does this thing where she’ll just kind of get lightheaded and then she’ll be like, “No, no. I’m fine. I’m fine.” And moving on. Because also, with women who raise entire families and multiple generations and families, that’s one of the defining characteristics of their lives.
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So this idea of not being able to have autonomy. My mother is like this. My mother walks every day. She bikes everywhere. She’s got a whole social life. And she’s very aware that she’s getting older, but also, she has a way in which she uses herself and the way she needs to function in the world, and nobody’s taking that from her. Nothing on the outside and nothing on the inside is taking that away. So that’s what I love about Rainey. Rainey’s just like, “I don’t care what’s going on. I’m trying to see my kid. I’m trying to be here for my family. I’m trying to have my social life. I’m trying to live a life of purpose and live a life of support.”
She’s just championing Ashley. The patience that she has for this daughter-in-law. And you’re expecting her to be like, “Listen, little girl.” [Laughs.] And instead she’s doing this thing where she’s like, “I’d like to give you a thought.” Which is like, the patience that it takes to speak that way to somebody. But she knows the balance in the house has to stay cool. If they start fighting, it’s over. There’s so much wisdom in that.
In this season, we see a lot more of Miles, your character. As an actor, how was it different to approach this season for you?
What’s fun about this is, obviously, in the movie, I got to play Miles a whole lot, but I got to play a very different Miles. I got to play the Miles that was like a liability for Collin. So when we come back to this show, it’s that Miles on the other side of all that, and it’s through Ashley’s eyes. In Season 1, because he’s absent, a lot of that’s clear space for the cast to get their shine on.
We’re just seeing Ashley’s version of him as a ghost, really, and the sweet little interactions between the glass. But of course, they’re going to be sweet. He’s nervous. “Are they going to leave me? Am I going to be alone in here?” This season, they have to contend with the reality that they’re married, they have a son, and they have to figure out how the hell are they going to get through this? And suddenly, Miles can’t be the grateful partner anymore. He’s struggling, and it’s coming out all over the place. Ashley’s struggling, obviously, but that doesn’t mean that he can be the rock. He’s in San Quentin. We’re so sympathetic to them outside, but it’s like, “Do you understand that he’s in hell? And we don’t even know why.” You know?
That’s true.
The fun of it is to return and be this other version of Miles that Ashley sees but then start to feel some of that Miles from the movie unraveling a bit and be like, “Oh, yeah, this guy’s complicated. This guy’s got a lot of his own anger issues, and he’s fighting for his life every day in this really hostile environment. And he’s trying to put on a face for his family, and it’s failing.”
Atticus, who plays Sean, is so great this season. Even better than the first. His birthday party episode is so relatable. I went to a kid’s birthday party not too long ago, and everybody was losing their minds.
Yeah, yeah. If you’ve never been to a 7-year-old’s birthday party, it’s like no one’s having a good time, except for the kids.
Especially not the moms.
For everybody else, it’s a drama fest. Because there’s adult drama, there’s kid drama, there’s inter-parent drama, there’s present drama, cake drama.
Piñata drama.
Piñata drama, for sure. The fun of Season 2 is now that we know the cast better and know what their strengths were, we could write for them. And we also had a writers room that could write better for them and make sure that they were in scenes where they could improvise in the way that would be most entertaining. But Atticus is always the surprise, because you just never know how a kid’s going to do. He is the same age as his character. There’s something about that year and a half or so before we started filming again; he just grew up a bit. It was really right before Episode 6. That’s like our big fantasy episode. He really had to step up for that. It’s a lot. That episode really hangs on him. He worked so hard on it. He worked with a dialect coach. He worked with an acting coach to get the dialogue down. And he took horseback riding lessons.
He had to do so much. And really, from that point on was the big, big growth. He was already killing it in the early episodes, but because I directed about half the season and that’s the third episode I directed, that was when I noticed the big, big shift where I’d throw the camera on him and go, “We have 10 minutes to get this, bud. Do you feel ready? Or do you want to… Should we go outside and do some breathing stuff? What do you want to do?” And he would just look at me and be like, “No, I got it.”
With Season 1, the incarceration storyline was so important and so necessary to tell. We dive a little bit deeper into that [in Season 2] also with Earl. How do you feel that part of the story has progressed in Season 2?
We look at a lot of the characters. Everyone is sort of experiencing a different vantage point of the prison industrial complex. Right? So we’re always trying to contend with, “Well, from their vantage point, how is it affecting their lives?” Ashley’s coming back nine months after the sentence. We’re kind of closing it in on the first year. So the conversation around her is, “All right. What happens after? You’re in the stasis of it for a while. You’re starting a long haul.” Ashley really is the one who is going through the odyssey. So the first season is really that initial separation, that realization it’s going to be a long time before you get back to your loved one. And Season 2 is like, “All right. Now, we’re off. We’ve been on the journey for a while. We’ve been walking through the desert for a while. How is it weighing on you? How is it really starting to take you to a place of hopelessness?”
And then you got Rainey, whose son’s been in there for a while, and she just wants to hug him and be near him. And the only way to do that is through Ashley, and she’s got to deal with that. Trish is negotiating it kind of like, “All right. My brother’s gone. How do I sort of disassociate and just focus on my own shit?”
Right.
And Earl, to your point, he had to go back. So now, he’s our example of this recidivism and the reality that people go back over and over again. And how does he reclaim his life and his sense of safety now that he’s out again? And yet, he’s off probation, but he doesn’t feel any less kind of traumatized about the whole thing. If you go character to character, we’re all kind of moving the needle forward a bunch and going, “All right, the next chapter of incarceration looks like this. We got all of our jokes.” You’ve watched it now. It’s an absurd season.
It’s so funny.
It’s nothing but laughs. We’re cracking up all the time. And then every once in a while, it just hits you, like, “Oh, right, this is a show about prison.” But we try to let you forget that as much as possible, so you’re just falling in love with these people and you just want to hang out with them.
Blindspotting Season 2 airs on Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on STARZ.
