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The first season of Amazon’s The Outlaws had a bit of an identity crisis. Was it a serious thriller with silly characters or an ensemble comedy trying to be a crime drama?
Season 2 of The Outlaws has no such problem, and it delivers an increasingly tense, fast-paced conclusion to the lead characters’ saga that’s lighter on laughs but filled with strong performances and smart twists.
Co-created and largely written by Emmy winner Stephen Merchant (The Office) along with Elgin James (Mayans M.C.), the British series picks up its sophomore arc exploring how the events of season 1 left the group of lead characters: Still serving community service together, but now unlikely allies united by a stolen bag of money. The new season forces them to confront the very real danger posed by their decision to keep the money, and they end up on the wrong side of the sadistic drug dealer who wants his money back — with interest. In order to pay him back and protect themselves and their loved ones, they need to get even more comfortable operating in the criminal underworld.
Season 1 of The Outlaws ended on a somewhat unsatisfying note, with the group finally showing solidarity but their lives still in very real jeopardy. In hindsight, the episode that ended that season feels more like a typical midseason finale, offering a tiny taste of what the characters could accomplish together while raising the stakes in the story to come.
In contrast, season 2 delivers a thoroughly satisfying arc that effectively wraps things up for just about everyone in The Outlaws in one way or another — even when their concluding chapters suggest their stories aren’t quite over. It does so at a surprisingly efficient pace, too, with the season’s six episodes rarely detouring into the smaller, funny subplots that peppered season 1.
Right from the start, season 2 is full-speed ahead on the characters’ descent into criminal life and the rapid unraveling of their lives the deeper they go.
While this shift in tone makes season 2 of The Outlaws a significantly less funny experience, it does deliver an extremely compelling, tense narrative, darker than just about anything Merchant has worked on so far. As crime thrillers go, The Outlaws checks all the boxes and offers a little something extra with the humor Merchant and the cast provide along the way.
Season 2 continues to do a nice job of spreading the screen time around, too. Where the first season of The Outlaws bounced the characters off each other in entertaining ways, the second season spends more time diving into their respective solo arcs, exploring how the people and events transpiring around them have changed them — and not always for the better.
At the end of season 1, the characters were fascinating together. When season 2 ends, they’re just as fascinating individually, too.
Although Christopher Walken got top billing — and deservedly so — to launch the series, the Oscar winner takes a bit of a backseat in season 2, getting involved in less of the action, but still delivering a great performance when given the chance. His costars all step up admirably, and it’s difficult to call out any particular performance above the others due to how wonderful each actor is in the series and the excellent chemistry they show with each other. Alongside Walken and Merchant, Rhianne Barreto, Darren Boyd, Clare Perkins, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Gamba Cole all get time to shine in season 2 and take full advantage of the opportunity.
Joining them, Jessica Gunning (Back), who plays the group’s community-service supervisor, delivers some of the show’s biggest laughs across both seasons, while Claes Bang (The Northman) gives the season a truly terrifying villain as the drug dealer known only as The Dean.
More satisfying than the season that preceded it, season 2 of The Outlaws does a great job of exploring the world it introduced in season 1 and fully realizing the paths the story put its characters on. Anyone who left season 1 feeling a bit underserved by the series will likely find the show’s second — and possibly final — set of episodes more rewarding, even without as many laughs.
Season 2 of The Outlaws premieres August 5 on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.