‘Lethal Weapon’ Interview: Executive Producer Matt Miller Teases Season 2

Will Riggs avenge his wife’s death

and kill Tito Flores in the Lethal Weapon Season 2 premiere? Don’t worry, we won’t spoil that for you! Last season, viewers were taken on a wild ride as they followed Murtaugh and Riggs’ adventures with the LAPD. The ride gets even more crazy this season. 

BuddyTV spoke with Lethal Weapon‘s executive producer, Matt Miller, to get the scoop on what’s coming up for our favorite cop duo, including where the season begins, Murtaugh and Riggs’ relationship, the Miranda story, the journey forward for Riggs and Murtaugh, and much more. And yes, including about Hilarie Burton’s return as Agent Palmer!

Does the season pick up right after the events of the Season 1 finale?

Yeah. There’s a two-week time jump. So we jump forward two weeks and without giving up too much, Murtaugh has been in Mexico looking for Riggs. He’s spent the last couple week’s searching for him and his wife is running out patience and she’s like, “Is this like even sanctioned.” And, he’s been spending a lot of money on the credit card at different hotels and things like that. He’s been kind of living it up for the last two weeks. The show begins two weeks later. Trish is pissed at Murtaugh. He’s still down there and he sort of runs into Riggs and all Hell breaks loose.

When Murtaugh goes down there, is he doing it more to help Riggs in his mission or to save Riggs from himself?

I think he’s going down to save Riggs from himself. It’s not like he wants to kill Tito or anything like that. So he goes down specifically with the idea to pull him back from the darkness.

Does he believe that he can?

I don’t know. [laughs] I think he’s gonna give it a try. A lot of stuff happens that’s hopefully a little unexpected and resets the guys up going forward.

Murtaugh would have to believe that or he wouldn’t leave his family behind if he thought Riggs was a lost cause.

Yeah, I think he thinks that he’s still worthy of saving. And that’s sort of Murtaugh’s achilles heel, which is he feels like he always to save things and fix things that are broken. We get into that a little bit in Season 2.

In the finale, Riggs could have taken out Flores. He was close enough and he didn’t. During these two weeks, what’s Riggs been doing?

[Riggs] has been harassing him. He’s been taunting him and leaving voicemails and texts. A lot of things to try and get into his head. I think if he just killed him there at the end of our season finale, it wouldn’t have felt satisfying. He wants him to know that it’s coming and to be worried about it every day and then have it happen.

When Riggs kills Flores, it is the end of this story personally and would provide closure. In a way, Riggs is someone I’d think wouldn’t want closure or be able to handle closure, is that part of the story as well?

What we try to do in the first episode of the season is try our best to give him some closure. We told the Miranda story in Season 1. It’s not that interesting to tell a guy mourning the death of his wife when he already knows who’s behind it and all that for five or six season. That mystery was solved in the course of Season 1, so he does get some degree of closure and we want to see Riggs trying to assimilate and try to be normal, but it just doesn’t work. And what we come to learn in Season 2 is there’s some things about him that have been broken for a very long time. It’s not as simple as trying to wrap up– however we do it– the man responsible for killing his wife, but rather he has some really deep scars that go back to early Riggs, early childhood and things like that. We get into a lot this season.

What’s happening with the Murtaugh family?

His oldest son goes off to college in the beginning of the season. So RJ is no longer in the house and Riana starts to date his enemy, McNeile’s son, the next door neighbor and that causes all kinds of problems for them. Trish got this big, fancy job at the end of Season 1, and we start to pursue that a lot in Season 2, and what that means when she’s not around as much as she usually had been. Whereas Trish gives Murtaugh infinite rope with his relationship with Riggs, and in general, what happens when she’s not available and he feels a little bit more possessive maybe, and a little bit more insecure, and that starts to cause some problems for them.

Any guest stars coming in Season 2?

We have Thomas Lennon coming back. He’s reprising his role as Leo Getz. Hilarie Burton comes back for a bunch of episode as  Karen Palmer. And then, we bring in a lot of new guest stars this season. We have a very famous Chicago sports legend. Not Michael Jordan, but I’d say the second most famous, Scottie Pippen, is going to be on the show. That’s going to be great. And we have some new characters who we’re introducing through the course of the season.

You mentioned Hilarie Burton’s coming back. Fans are either all about Palmer or–

Or they’re opposed to it. It’s kind of polarizing. She comes back in as a function of Riggs wanting to get healthy. They had gotten quite close at the end of Season 1. At the beginning of Season 2, she comes back in as he starts to revisit some of those things that he left undone at the end of the season because of the Miranda stuff. She’s in for a couple of episodes in the early part and then she’ll come back later. The plan is to bring her a couple times this year and we’ll see how that goes.

Will we see Miranda in flashbacks?

Maybe a little bit. The focus again is on the story of Riggs and we’ll see some flashbacks from before he met Miranda. We go back a little bit deeper. We’ll see her certainly in the first episode back. We see her in some flashbacks and then we’ll see how it goes as the season goes on.

Who is Riggs leaning on trying to work through his issues?

A lot of Cahill, the Jordana Brewster character. They spend a lot of time together. For her, it’s like when you’re curing someone with some trauma or something like that, you kind of always want to start at the beginning. He’s very reluctant to go back. He was reluctant to talk about Miranda, so he’s even more reluctant to talk about some of the earlier stuff. Cahill is there. And of course, Murtaugh and the Murtaugh family is there for him. 

So there will still be Murtaugh family dinners?

Oh, yeah.  A lot of Murtaugh family dinners. 

He’s brought back into the fold?

Yeah. [laughs] Off and on. They kick him out and they bring him back in. And even some friction in some scenes between Trish and Riggs, which you haven’t really seen before, but watching him even get on her nerves a little bit and how that all plays out.

Riggs disappeared and now he’s back. What’s his status at the police department? Is he still viewed the same way as in Season 1 or differently?

He’s welcomed back by like Avery, but there is a different– We try to bring in, early in the season, a more internal affairs component to this because Riggs and Murtaugh have been off the grid in Mexico and wreaking havoc and even in Los Angeles. We bring in a character played by Michelle Hurd. She comes in as Avery’s boss. She comes in because Avery’s really become one of the gang and we needed someone who was gonna like be the buck stops here. And we also start to learn there’s a little bit of a misunderstood sexual past between her and Murtaugh from many, many years ago, early on in the force. It’s fun.

So it’s a contentious relationship?

Yeah, with Murtaugh and this character.

Riggs has always been spontaneous and it ends up working out in most cases, is that still a core characteristic when he comes back. More or less so?

I think that he’s still a bit of a loose canon. I don’t think he’s trying to actively confront death as much as he was maybe in Season 1, but maybe he’ll get back there later on. You can’t play a guy who wants to die, wants to die, wants to die every episode. The season and the arc of the character has to go through these peaks and valleys. So maybe a low point for him was towards the end of Season 1, we pick him up in Season 2 and he starts to try his best to be normal, but that’s never going to quite be normal. He’s actively pursuing it. And he tries and things get a little bit better for him, and he comes back with Palmer, and things start to happen to bring him back down.

On Season 2

It’s gonna be a really good season. It’s gonna be super fun. In Season 1, we dove very much into the Murtaugh and Riggs getting to know each other for the first time and the Riggs and Miranda story. And we feel like every season, we’ll have some version of our mythology not wrapping up, but starting a new mythology in the next season, so you’re building layers on the whole thing. This season, we start the first couple episodes are a little bit lighter and more comedic, so we allow Riggs to get his sea legs about him before things come in and cut him off at the knees again.

Watch Lethal Weapon Season 2 Tuesdays at 8/7c on FOX. For more on the series, like BuddyTV’s Lethal Weapon Facebook Page. 

(Image courtesy of FOX.)