SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “The Madison,” now streaming on Paramount+.
The too-brief first season of “The Madison” has come to an end, and after six tear-jerking episodes, fans are already looking forward to what a second season will bring for the Clyburns. The first season focused on Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer), who packed up and moved her family from bustling New York City to Montana after the death of her husband and family patriarch, Preston (Kurt Russell).
While no date has been set for the second season, it was already filmed before the show premiered. Because of that, during the press cycle for Season 1, stars Michelle and Russell were able to preview what audiences can expect next season.
“It’s after the initial stage of raw grief passes, and some time has gone by,” Pfeiffer says. “It’s the messy and profound rebuilding of everything that you knew after everything that you knew has fallen apart and what that looks like.”
Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed every episode of Season 1, also teased the idea of moving on in the next season.
“I think by the end of Season 1, there are a number of questions to be answered in terms of what the next steps will be for the Clyburn family,” she says. “Season 2 begins to delve into that.”
Russell adds that a darkness comes into the show’s second season.
“I think it’s fair to say that in Season 2 — and I believe Michelle will agree with me — what happens is the level of real danger goes up,” he says. “Things begin to become dangerous in realistic ways.”
When it comes to realism, Russell says the script’s relatability in Season 1 was a main element that appealed to him.
“It was a matter of reading it and saying, ‘Wow, at what point was [writer Taylor Sheridan] a fly on the wall in our house?’” he says. “We lived part of the time in Los Angeles, but I did move to Colorado when I was 26 years old to live the way I wanted to live and still be in the business. When I read it, I realized how, for the first time, I was going to play somebody similar to myself, as opposed to somebody who was a broad character or something in a very different genre. This is in the wheelhouse of reality, relatability as human beings, one to the other. It’s adventure of the soul, and I was right for it. There were both sides of this guy. I’ve lived it. So it was more bringing the right thing for Michelle and for the show, which I felt confident in doing.”
Voros also says she felt an intense closeness to the material.
“I would be hard-pressed to imagine a story that felt more organic for me,” she says. “I’m a Boston-raised, longtime New York City-living gal who met a cowboy on a Western in Mississippi, and now live in West Texas. My husband’s actually our animal coordinator on this show, and a lot of the ‘Yellowstone’ shows. The idea of being someone who identifies as being from a city and discovering not only a part of the country that is foreign to you, but the part of yourself that emerges when you transplant yourself into a different environment, and makes you question your identity and the choices one makes in how to live their life. It was a wild script to end up on my doorstep, because it felt so incredibly personal to me.”
Watch a trailer for “The Madison” below.
