Will ‘Criminal Record’ Return for Season 2? Why Finale Ended Like It Did for Hegarty & Lenker

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Criminal Record finale “Carla.”]

Apple TV+‘s latest crime thriller does wrap up its case in the finale, but given that nothing really seems to be limited anymore, we have to ask the question: Will there be a Criminal Record Season 2?

“Quite honestly, we’ve been so consumed by making this series—we didn’t finish in post very long ago—and getting it out that we just haven’t really had those conversations. We just want everybody to love this season,” executive producer Elaine Collins told TV Insider. Added executive producer Paul Rutman, “Then we’ll see.”

The finale sees the truth come out about the murder for which Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi) has been serving time all these years. He didn’t kill his girlfriend, despite a statement her son Patrick gave to Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi) that led to Errol’s confession. Rather, the murderer was Stefan Ash (Paul Thornley), whom Tony (Charlie Creed-Miles) then Hegarty used as an informant. And so Errol is free.

For Moutchi, the scene when Errol finds out he’s free was the most emotional one for him to film. “When I read the scripts, I cried, but I have this knack of not being able to do it on the day,” he shared. “I found it on the day because it’s there, you get to see, and I’ve been through the whole eight episodes, and it was around the last few shoots of the whole series.”

Though the confession he got from Errol is reviewed, there’s no clear indication that Hegarty led him and so he’s not going to be fired. “Who knows what any of us are capable of any given day?” he asks Detective Sergeant June Lenker (Cush Jumbo). He knows she thinks he’s prejudiced. “Well, are you?” she asks. “Maybe,” he admits. “Nine days out of 10, you’d have been all over every lab report, every alibi, every comma,” Lenker notes. “Why not that time? Why not for [Errol]?”

Lenker then goes to see Errol, who has reunited with Patrick, and he tells her that he believed what his stepson said; he heard him say to his mother: “I’ll knock you flat.” Lenker then takes out the recording of Hegarty interviewing Patrick and realizes the six-year-old boy was just quoting the cartoon on TV. “You poisoned him,” she calls Hegarty to tell him. “You poisoned his whole life with that, didn’t you? And what happened to follow the facts? What happened to that?” He doesn’t answer and hangs up.

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“I felt that if we didn’t have that moment, that there was something slightly too neat and tidy about the ending and that there was something maybe slightly sentimental about our worldview if we just said, okay, he’s penitent. He says sorry, everybody’s learned and grown, and we move forward,” Rutman explained. “And I just don’t think that is quite what the world is. I think Hegarty’s, in a way, a bit bigger and maybe more dangerous than that. We just wanted to just open another trap door and just say, hello, there’s still danger out there. There’s still the possibility that he’s something else.”

Collins added that they wanted to make sure that their characters were “really complex and not all good or not all bad” rather than tell a story about redemption. “We wanted both of the characters to sort of embody more than just a sort of good and bad view of the world, but for both of them at different times to sort of sit somewhere in between,” she said.

If Errol were to find out that Patrick had just been quoting a TV show, “I think he’d end up back in jail,” according to Moutchi. “He has a rage to him. Knowing that I did 12 years and you used Tom & Jerry to get me, yeah, that’s too much.” It’s also the fact that he used his son, whom he loves and believed.

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Moutchi also admitted that he “really didn’t agree with” the ending for Hegarty, “watching it objectively, not being that actor in it.” However, he continued, “I also understand that that’s a whole ‘nother message as well. People get away with that stuff all the time. It’s more frequent that people get away than actually get released from prison. So that was a truth as well. We all as an audience have to live with the fact that this happens.”

What did you think of this season of Criminal Record? Would you want to see more of Hegarty and Lenker? Let us know in the comments below.

Criminal Record, Streaming now, Apple TV+