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Four weeks out of Reading Gaol and straight to a greyhound track with a gun: MobLand’s second season asks Pierce Brosnan to stop being the calmest man in the room.
Season one of MobLand closed on an image built for applause. Conrad Harrigan, the silver-haired Irish patriarch Pierce Brosnan play in the Paramount+ London crime drama, walks a prison landing while the inmates cheer him like a king coming home. Brosnan described the scene as a nod to The Italian Job, the 1968 caper in which Noël Coward’s jailed kingpin gets the same ovation from a gantry. It was filmed inside Reading Gaol, the Victorian prison where Oscar Wilde served two years of hard labour. It looked like a coronation. It was a pause, and the second season, now streaming, spends its opening hour proving that the man in the coat has stopped pretending to be patient.
Signal. What happened: MobLand season 2 premiered on Paramount+ on 18 September 2026 with the episode “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” two weeks after the streamer renewed the series for a third season on 3 September 2026. Exact object: Pierce Brosnan as Conrad Harrigan, opposite Helen Mirren as Maeve Harrigan and Tom Hardy as the family fixer Harry Da Souza, in a ten-episode second season. When and where: streaming worldwide on Paramount+, one new episode every Friday through a 20 November finale. Source: Paramount+ Why it matters: an actor whose screen identity has been built for three decades on composure is being sold, this season, on the loss of it.
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The first season had already put the pieces in place. Its finale unmasked O’Hara Delaney as the leak inside the Harrigan operation, and Harry answered by wiping out Richie Stevenson and his crew. Conrad and Helen Mirren‘s Maeve went to prison on charges built from planted evidence. From inside, Maeve told Eddie (Anson Boon) that Conrad, not Kevin, is his real father, which turned a grandson into a son and a spare into an asset. Behind visiting-room glass, Kevin (Paddy Considine), the eldest and most loyal child, finally walked away from his father and told him so. And at home, Jan Da Souza (Joanne Froggatt) asked Harry for a divorce and ended the argument with a knife in him.
Reading Gaol, where the season one finale staged Conrad’s Victorian prison-landing ovation
That is a lot of broken furniture to carry into a new season. The cell, on paper, should have been the end of Conrad’s authority. Instead it became the launch pad for the version of him the series has been building toward.
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The role did not begin as Conrad. When the job reached Brosnan in the summer of 2024, he told the Television Academy, it was called The Donovans, and he was lined up to play a grandfather or great-grandfather figure to Liev Schreiber’s fixer from Ray Donovan, the long-running Showtime drama. There were five scripts. He signed because of the writing of Ronan Bennett, the Top Boy writer who created the show, and the dialogue of playwright Jez Butterworth.
Somewhere in development the prequel idea fell away and the story became its own family, rooted in London’s Irish underworld rather than Boston’s. That cut Brosnan and Mirren loose from someone else’s canon, and the two built a private history for the Harrigans between themselves. Guy Ritchie directed key episodes and stayed on as an executive producer, bringing the swagger and sudden violence that have been his signature since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
What emerged is a character built on a deliberate contradiction. The show’s very first scene has Conrad enjoying a fine meal upstairs in a smart restaurant and then heading down to the basement to finish off a man already full of bullets. The Television Academy’s own write-up framed him as both the arsonist and the firefighter of his empire. Brosnan, Irish-born and for a generation the tuxedoed James Bond of GoldenEye through Die Another Day, brings a face audiences still read as trustworthy. The writing then makes that face do filthy things.
He has played killers before: the burnt-out hitman of The Matador, the former agent of The November Man. But in those films the menace was part of the pitch from the poster onward. In MobLand the contrast is the pitch. The suit, the silver hair and the farmer’s calm are there so that the violence underneath can land harder. Even the accent was a choice rather than a default; Brosnan has said he first assumed Conrad would sound North or South London before the character settled into his Irish register.
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Season two wastes no time explaining how the Harrigans got out. The premiere picks up roughly four weeks after the first season’s bloodshed, and Conrad and Maeve are simply free. Mirren, talking to The Hollywood Reporter, said their release happened “miraculously,” and Brosnan admit he had wondered himself how the writers would manage it.
The episode is named after The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, continuing the show’s habit of borrowing song titles, and Ritchie is back behind the camera for it. It opens at a greyhound track. Conrad and Maeve arrive with their enforcer Paul (Emmett J. Scanlan) and Paul’s nephew Fergus, a newcomer about to get a very short education in how the family operates. They are there to close a heroin deal with a Turkish boss, Gakbu, whom Conrad cut into an eight-figure arrangement weeks earlier. Gakbu does not show. He sends his brother Luca instead, and it emerges that Kevin has already gone around his father and done the deal himself. The Harrigans answer the insult by shooting up the room and killing every Turk in it.
Harry, meanwhile, is somewhere else entirely: sitting in couples therapy with Jan, working through the small matter of her having stabbed him. He gets pulled out to clean up the track, which is the whole job description in one scene. Hardy’s fixer is the only character in the premiere who seems to understand what is actually happening. He warns Conrad that the feud with Kevin is exactly the kind of split a patient rival would exploit, and he suspects that Kat McAllister is already working that seam.
The shape of the premiere is simple. A family that insists it is unbreakable spends an hour breaking itself, and the patriarch who was cheered on a prison landing responds to his first test of authority as a free man by reaching for a gun. Seat42F read it as a family that has stopped pretending it is on the same side.
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The twist in Brosnan’s second season is not a new kind of role. It is the same man with the volume turned up. Where season one kept Conrad’s rage mostly under the silver hair, season two lets it out in front of everybody, and the early reviews have noticed. One called his energy crazed. The second episode, named for Blur’s “Song 2,” streamed on 25 September with Conrad described as increasingly unstable while Maeve keeps weaving plans of her own.
The marketing leaned into it well before launch. The official season two trailer makes it plain that Kevin still wants the throne and wants his father dead, and that Conrad is entirely prepared to return the favour. It is scored to “The Foggy Dew” by The Young Dubliners, a song about rebellion and retribution, which tells you how Paramount+ wants the season read. One character sums up the family’s condition in the trailer as a death spiral.
That is an unusual sell for a Brosnan performance. His career has rested on an image of control: the man who can walk into a hotel bar in a good suit and be believed. MobLand keeps the suit and the coat and the gloves, then uses the audience’s trust in that image as the setup for the punchline. The composure was never the character. It was the camouflage.
Mirren is working the same seam from the other side. Maeve does her damage quietly, with a drink in hand and a plan nobody else has been told about, and the season’s early episodes suggest the Harrigan marriage will be as dangerous to the family as any outside rival. Critics have been generous with the result. The second season arrived with a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes at launch, up from 77 percent for the first.
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The louder Conrad gets, the longer the line of people who want him gone. Kevin is the obvious one, openly at war with his father after the prison visit. His sister Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon) is gaining influence inside the organisation and, in the trailer, sits down with Kat McAllister to say it is time for change. Eddie now knows whose son he really is, and Maeve is using that knowledge for purposes the premiere keeps deliberately vague.
Kat is the outside threat. Janet McTeer, introduced late in the first season, returns as a series regular and the season’s expected chief antagonist, a figure from the international underworld whose offer Harry turned down at the end of season one. Alongside her is Toby Jones as Colin Tattersall, the former detective fixed on bringing the Harrigans down and tied into a wider conspiracy. By the end of the premiere, Tattersall is proposing that Kat take on someone to run her operations, and Johnny Flynn‘s Frankie Cooper steps into view. Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond are the season’s headline new additions.
Set against all that is Harry, who spends the first two episodes trying to stop a family war while his own marriage comes apart and his daughter Gina (Teddie Allen) drifts closer to the business. It is the same engine that powered season one: a calm professional trying to keep a house standing while the people who own it keep setting fires in the rooms. The difference now is that the loudest arsonist is the man who signs his cheques.
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Off screen, the drama that nearly reshaped the show was about Hardy, not Brosnan. In late spring, Deadline reported that Hardy would not return for a third season after friction with Butterworth, who also serves as showrunner, and further reports of on-set tension with the producers at David Glasser’s 101 Studios followed through the summer. For a series whose central structure is Harry holding the Harrigans together, losing him would have meant either writing out the lead or recasting him.
Paramount+ settled it on 3 September. The streamer renewed MobLand for a third season with Hardy, Brosnan and Mirren all confirmed, and headed its announcement with a single line: The Harrigans aren’t going anywhere. A third-season writers’ room had already been running for months, which made the pickup close to a formality. The numbers explain why. MobLand was the second-biggest launch for a Paramount+ original series, behind only Landman. At the London premiere of season two on 10 September, Hardy appeared alongside Mirren, Brosnan, Ritchie and Glasser in what read as a deliberate show of unity.
The renewal also removes some suspense from the season in progress. With all three leads confirmed for season three, the patriarch, the matriarch and the fixer are, on the evidence of the paperwork at least, still standing when the finale ends. What shape Conrad is in by then is the open question, and it is the one season two is built to answer.
Two episodes of the second season have now streamed. Eight remain, one each Friday on Paramount+, before the finale on 20 November.
