Period Drama ‘Jamestown’ Will Return for a Third Season

Netflix's Bridgerton has brought the romance of the Regency era to streaming. But with Season 2 not yet greenlit, we have a few PBS drama suggestions for what to watch next.

Previously on Jamestown: Jocelyn, Verity, Pedro and James Read all head off to search for the mariners who originally brought slaves to Jamestown. Along the way, Joss gets shot with an arrow in the gut, but doesn’t die thanks to James savvy medical skills, which involve digging around in her body with a dirty knife. It’s fine. Why start doing hygiene now? Afterward, as an injured Jocelyn continues to traipse through the countryside, Verity decides to give her a pep talk about James Read and how great he is and eventually both of these idiots admit they’re in love – kind of. But Jocelyn isn’t down to give up her freedom to any man Elsewhere, Temperance has decided she’s over everything and enlists the help of Maria to help drive her husband insane so they can go back to England with their unborn baby.  For a full rundown of all this weirdness, our Episode 7 recap is this way.

As most viewers probably already knew coming into this, Season 3 of Jamestown is the series’ last. Whether this is due to poor ratings, expensive filming costs or simply the cast’s desire to move on is unclear. But though the series’ finale does try to tie up most of the (many, many) outstanding plotlines this show, Jamestown somehow manages to end with both a bang and a whimper, dedicating its final moments to the long-hinted-at native attack on the colony, which historically did kill hundreds of settlers. But since that climactic moments takes place during the episode’s final minutes, it feels like nothing so much as a cliffhanger into Season 4 that never got to go anywhere.

Previously on Jamestown: Since Temperance is pregnant, Yeardley decides to write a will, in which he transfers ownership of Pedro and Maria to his unborn child. Everyone in town is suddenly real upset about this, which is somehow a step further than owning people generally, flogging them and forcing them to pick your crops for free, I don’t know. But whatever, suddenly James, Verity and a bunch of other townsfolks are real invested in finding the mariners who brought slaves to Jamestown in the first place, though the reasons for that are wildly unclear beyond the fact that Pedro would like to kill them for what they did. Which I suppose make sense. And despite the fact that Crabtree is a powerful man who could stop Yeardley from doing, well…basically anything, he decides to let himself be arrested instead. See our recap of Episode 6 for more.

Just when it seemed as though Jamestown had lost the particularly bonkers style of storytelling that made it such fun to watch, the series comes roaring back with an installment that features everything from unhygienic outdoor surgery, drug-fueled nightmare visions, an out of wedlock pregnancy, a murder cover-up and some super awkward match-making.