- Network
- Fox
- Creators
- Chris Fedak and Sam Sklaver
- Episodes
- 33 across two seasons
- Original run
- September 23, 2019 to May 18, 2021
- Lead
- Tom Payne as Malcolm Bright
- Co-lead
- Michael Sheen as Martin Whitly
- Studio
- Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television
Watch Order
0 / 2 watchedTwo seasons in broadcast order. Twenty episodes first, then thirteen, with no separate chronological order to sort.
About Prodigal Son
Prodigal Son is an American procedural drama created by Chris Fedak and Sam Sklaver for Fox, produced by Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television. It premiered on September 23, 2019 and was cancelled after two seasons in May 2021, having ended on May 18, 2021.
Tom Payne plays Malcolm Bright, a former FBI profiler now working for the NYPD, and Michael Sheen plays Malcolm's father Martin Whitly, a cardiothoracic surgeon serving life in an asylum after twenty-three murders as the Surgeon. Malcolm turned his father in at the age of ten, which is why he is a profiler and why he is not allowed near his own family.
The hook is the way Malcolm works. He can look at a crime from the killer's point of view, which makes him invaluable and makes him complicit, and the series builds its two seasons around that tension rather than around a single case. The first series ran twenty episodes from September 2019 to April 2020, the second ran thirteen from January to May 2021.
Good to know
Watch the episodes in broadcast order. The show runs one long case per series with a personal thread underneath, so skipping ahead loses the shape of it, and the first series ends on a turn that the second one answers.
Twenty episodes in the first season and thirteen in the second, thirty three in total, and the run ends unresolved because Fox cancelled it rather than because the story finished. Reviews were mixed at the time, with the criticism aimed at the procedural side of the show rather than Sheen's performance.
The same case material turned up in the paperback series that novelist Alex Kava wrote alongside the show, so if you want the ending the screen version does not give, that is where to look.
