Following the dramatic finale of KIN on Sunday night, the show's director says that the chances of a second series of the crime drama are "a lottery".
The final episode of the hit show about a war between two Dublin crime families proved a huge hit with Irish viewers, with an average of 502,000 people tuning into RTÉ One and a significant number of viewers catching up on the show after the live broadcast with a consolidated figure of 620,000 viewers for the first seven episodes.
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KIN also set a record on RTÉ Player with nearly two million streams to date, making it the most watched new drama series on the Player this year.
Speaking about the possibility of a second season, IFTA-nominated film and TV director Diarmuid Goggins said, "It’s a lottery. We have to wait and see so I don’t really know. I have no insight. I wish I could give it you but from my own part, I wish, and I hope. I feel that the crew did a great job and I’d love to see it again."
The closing scene does set things up nicely for a second series. "I think it does both," Goggins says. "There is a certain element of closure, but you can see we’ve also left things wide open with certain characters that we’d love to explore in the second season.
"The ending isn’t a cliff-hanger where we’d pick up from the exact same place if we got the go ahead for season two. At the same time Peter McKenna (KIN's writer) and I wanted to treat the ending as the end of a season and to be happy with that and if more comes, more comes."
There was a mostly positive reaction to the finale but Goggins says there is always controversy about how viewers will respond to any show coming to an end.
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"It’s something we’ve seen with other shows going all the way back to The Sopranos. The finale is always the thing," he says. "Peter always talks about how the characters talk to him, everything they do comes from the characters.
"Everything they’ve done including the finale was written by the characters. It’s true to them and it’s always hard to know how the audience will take it. The ending is truthful.
"There is a conclusion and closure but at the same time there is so much scope to grow and take the characters further afield if we get a chance of a second series."
Goggins, who recently completed work on series two of Bulletproof for SKY and The CW Network and who was previously been lead director on BBC drama Silent Witness, shot the pilot of KIN and from the off, it had a very distinctive look.
The house envy was real, and the Aviva Stadium became a star, but it was the glacial pace, creative camera angles and David Holmes’ tense soundtrack that gave the show it’s brooding atmosphere.
"I was always influenced by Jonathan Demme and movies like Silence of The Lambs, in which he played a lot with the eyeline, how close the camera is to the actors’ face," says Goggins. "You’re trying to sense and feel what the actors are going through.
"Breaking the fourth wall and seeing the actors look straight down the lens," he adds. "We used shots that shows the disconnect between the family. They may be a family but they’re as much disconnected as connected at times, particularly with Amanda and Jimmy."
And as it turned out shooting KIN during lockdown actually helped the look and feel of the show.
"Covid made things hard for us and we obviously put a lot of safety protocols but in some ways the quieter streets and a quieter world played into the dark mood so we tried to lean into it as much as we could," the director says.
"At certain times we got access to certain locations because of Covid because it was so quiet. However, people didn’t want to let us into their homes. I think when we started people worried that it was going to be more of a problem than it actually was.
"It slows up the process a little bit with costume changes. We had to clean costumes more often and clean locations. But it made us closer together even though we were two metres apart. That bond is on the screen."
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
KIN is available on the RTÉ Player
