Amazon has renewed One Mississippi, created by Tig Notaro and Diablo Cody, for a second season, which will start streaming in 2017.
The show stars Notaro in a semi-autobiographical story of a woman who, still reeling from her own declining health, returns to her childhood hometown of Bay Saint Lucille, Miss., to deal with the unexpected death of her mother, the one person who actually understood her. As she deals with the tragedy and events from her past, the series becomes an exploration of family.
One Mississippi also stars Noah Harpster, John Rothman and Notaro’s wife Stephanie Allynne. Kate Robin serves as showrunner, with Notaro, Cody, Robin, Louis C.K., M. Blair Breard and Dave Becky serving as executive producers.
“Making a show as comic and tragic as One Mississippi is a risk. Pulling it off with such intelligence and nuance is rare,” Amazon’s head of comedy and drama Joe Lewis said Monday in a statement. “We’re grateful for the audience response and we’re excited to bring them more of Tig and Kate’s brilliance in season two.”
In 2012, the stand-up comedian nearly died from a bacterial infection called C. Diff, went through a break-up, suffered the untimely death of her mother and was diagnosed with cancer. Notaro relayed the series of tragic events in a legendary stand-up routine, “Hello, I Have Cancer,” which made her an overnight sensation. Although she’s since recounted the events in subsequent TV specials, documentaries and in a memoir, One Mississippi is her first scripted, half-hour TV comedy.
Ahead of the second-season renewal, Notaro told The Hollywood Reporter some of her early ideas for where the show could head next, including whether or not Tig would pursue Kate, who is played by Allyne. The pair have 4-month-old twin sons Max and Finn.
“The Kate part is obviously a hint or tease that maybe there’s something there,” said Notaro, adding that she and Allyne, who also is a writer on the series, watched the season twice and took notes on what they thought would be interesting to add. “I broke up with Brooke, will that be the end of Brooke? I don’t know. I love Casey Wilson and she makes me laugh harder than most people alive, so it’s hard to say we’re done with her. But maybe we will.”
She continued: “Because Stephanie is my wife and a person in real life, I think people assume I’m going to end up with Kate. Will I? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. That’s been the fun part of it.”
Notaro said she’s enjoyed taking liberty with some of the storylines, even though it was hard for her at first to steer from her own reality of losing her mother.
“What’s funny is that one of the notes about the show was that I had too many romantic interests,” she said of her three love interests Kate (Allyne), Brooke (Wilson) and Jessie (Jill Bartlett). “I don’t mean to be braggadocious, but there was actually a fourth person in the real story. The Jessie character was a real relationship that went back and forth and it was not the one for me, but it was so helpful in my healing. There’s more to that story, but I don’t know if I’m going to tell it.”
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Though the comedian said her comedy no longer focuses on her cancer or her grief, she said One Mississippi will “probably follow some of the older storylines but into newer territory and more fictional topics.”
Notaro added, “People ask about my stand-up, ‘Are you going to close the chapter on the close association you have with cancer and people knowing you with that?’ And I say, ‘If it feels right to let it go.’ And it has. I don’t talk about having cancer in my stand-up anymore. I don’t have cancer. But if it comes up for me again, that I’m going through something, I’m going to talk about it. I’m going to do whatever feels right whenever it feels right.”
The comedy, which was initially set up as a script deal at FX but moved to Amazon, hails from C.K.’s FX Productions-based Pig Newton banner.
The first season of One Mississippi is currently available for Amazon’s Prime Video subscribers.
