Feb 25, 2015 4 min read

One big challenge in the proliferation of miniseries, event series and limited series on TV is what to do for an encore if they’re successful.

Ryan Murphy figured out one solution: Create a new story every year for “American Horror Story,” featuring some of the same actors, but in different roles.

Sometime soon, we’ll see follow-ups to “Fargo” and “True Detective,” among others, with new stories and new casts.

Chris Chibnall has opted to have it two ways with the second season of BBC America’s “Broadchurch,” premiering Wednesday: Within the continuation of the central storyline of the first season, he’s created a second mystery for terminally grouchy, carpetbagging detective Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and local cop Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) to solve.

It’s pretty smart and doubly engaging.

As you’ll remember, the first season of the show focused on the murder of a young boy in the seaside English community of Broadchurch. Danny Latimer was an average kid and the younger child of Beth and Mark Latimer (Jodie Whitakker and Mark Buchan). His best friend was the son of Ellie Miller and her husband, Joe (Matthew Graville). The boy’s murder not only tore his family apart, but revealed a certain ugliness beneath the superficial calm and quaintness of Broadchurch.

At the end of the first season, the cops arrested a seemingly unlikely suspect – but by the time Joe Miller was arrested, we’d already realized almost everyone else in Broadchurch could have done the deed.

When I talked to Whittaker in Los Angeles at the end of the first season, she was certain that she and Buchan would not be returning to the show. It made sense: What would be the point? The mystery of the Latimer boy’s death was solved, after all.

Ah, but that was before Chibnall came up with a way to continue the story without turning Broadchurch into a British version of Cabot Cove, Maine, where Jessica Fletcher couldn’t bicycle down the street without rolling into a murder case. Chibnall’s solution is to hook us through Miller’s trial, which turns out to be not the open and shut case we may have assumed it would be at the end of the first season.

Miller’s defense attorney Sharon Bishop (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is described by her opposing counsel as “a rottweiler,” which is one of the reason that retired barrister Jocelyn Knight (Charlotte Rampling) agrees to prosecute.

As the case becomes more and more labyrinthine and filled with surprises (most of which are very credible – one is distinctly not), Hardy is pulled back into the case that forced him to decamp to Broadchurch in the first place, the disappearance of two young sisters. The younger girl was found dead, the elder is still missing but presumed dead.

Hardy is haunted by the case, because it destroyed his marriage and nearly ruined his career, but most of all, because it remains unsolved. It turns out, Hardy has never given up trying to solve it, and once it’s revived, Ellie gets caught up in it as well. We are introduced to the prime suspect, played by James D’Arcy, who is also featured on ABC’s “Agent Carter.”

The performances are, again, superb. More than that, though, virtually every one has been modulated to reflect where the characters would be several months after Danny Lattimer’s death. Beth and Mark maintain the image of a working marriage, but both are emotionally battered, not just because they’ve lost their son, but because they seem to have lost the reason to be married.

The second season of that original show is back to remind us of that fact, and does so quite well.