Halle Berry’s TV series Extant is about to get a huge revamp ahead of its second season. News broke this week that the show is dumping a chunk of the cast that appeared in the first season and will be signing on a new crew during Season 2. A few of Extant’s cast members will stick around, including Halle Berry, Pierce Gagnon and Grace Gummer. The why and how of the transition gets a little stickier.
Extant’s main cast isn’t ridiculously large. In fact, the CBS summer drama is replacing two of its big characters—Goran Visnjic and Camryn Manheim, who play Berry’s husband and work friend, respectively, along with Hiroyuki Sanada and Michael O’Neil. You’d think cutting out some important characters would be budget related, but Extant actually had a pretty healthy run for a summer series during 2014. Instead, Deadline says the storyline will change radically during Season 2 and will follow Berry’s Molly as she searches for her alien son, who just so happens to be taking hostile action against humanity.
Extant’s first season followed a woman named Molly who returned from a solo space mission to rejoin her husband and her android son, only to find out she had somehow become pregnant with a space baby. When last we left the gang, Molly was returning home from a separate space mission and her android son had taken on a separate form. As her husband, John, seemed perfectly safe at the time, I’m not sure how the series plans to write him out, but this week’s report indicates that at least Goran Visnjic, who plays John, and Camryn Manheim will return to the series for a couple of episodes before the plot branches off into a different story.
I didn’t think Extant’s story ended particularly strongly last summer. I wouldn’t be shocked if CBS might just be hoping to streamline or rework the series with these changes. It won’t be the first show to ever retool. In fact, it won’t even be the first show this year to work out some major kinks before its second season airs. Earlier this year, HBO’s drama The Leftovers also announced that a majority of the supporting cast from Season 1 has been cut. Additionally, that show has opted to change up locations during Season 2. Obviously, like The Leftovers, Extant’s changes are big ones, we’ll have to wait and see whether or not those changes fit the Season 2 storyline.
Extant is expected to hit the schedule again during the summer of 2015. In the meantime, you can catch up on the series if you have Amazon Prime. Additionally, you can check out our full midseason schedule, here.
