Dirty John season 2 is officially a go with the team behind the highly-rated anthological series revealing the plot and leading cast members.
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So according to the presser, via Variety, season 2 will be titled Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story. And like season 1, the sequel will be based on another true story of love gone so, so wrong.
Season 2 will span decades, from the 1960s to the ’80s’, as it focuses on the breakdown of a well-known couple’s marriage, which ends in a double homicide.
Amanda Peet (A Lot Like Love) will star as the titular character, “the perfect Southern California blonde wife and mother” married to her charming college boyfriend Dan (Mr. Robot’s Christian Slater).
Betty supported Dan through both medical and law school, watching him succeed and sacrificing a bunch in the process. Years later, Dan inevitably makes it big in their local San Diego community and Betty can finally take a breather. But soon things begin to crack after Dan hires Linda Kolkena a “bright, beautiful young woman with whom he can happily forget the struggles of his past.”
You know where this is going.
“The first season of Dirty John was a story of twisted love and coercive control and both these insidious elements are also present in and integral to the story of Betty Broderick, whom I have wanted to write about since I became a writer,” series creator Alexandra Cunningham said.
Season 2 will premiere on the USA Network and hopefully hit Netflix sometime later. You can find Dirty John season 1, starring Connie Britton and Eric Banner, on Netflix now.
If you want to read more about Betty Broderick, read on. If not, get outta here.
Betty and Dan ended up divorcing, and at the time Oprah Winfrey called it one of “America’s messiest divorces”.
In 1989 Betty shot dead Dan and his new wife Linda while they slept. Betty didn’t deny that she killed her ex-husband and Linda, but said she was driven to do it after her husband’s treatment of her during their divorce and custody battle over their children.
The fucked bit is Betty ended up hiring a publicist to tell her side of the story in an attempt to gain the sympathy of women across the country who had been dumped by their husbands for a younger woman. And the thing is, it actually worked.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, her first trial in 1991 ended with a hung jury. But Betty was inevitably found guilty of second-degree murder in a second trial. She was sentenced to 32 years to life in prison at the Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility.
In 1992, CBS released A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story which premiered the same month she was sentenced. The LA Times said the film “became the second highest-rated TV movie of last season.”
Meredith Baxter, who starred as Betty, received an Emmy nomination for her performance. She also admitted she initially felt sympathetic toward the convicted murderer.
CBS later aired a sequel called Her Final Fury: The Betty Broderick Story, The Last Chapter.
In 2018, Betty was denied parole for a second time.
“Betty Broderick is an unrepentant woman,” Deputy District Attorney Richard Sachs told the LA Times afterwards. “She has no remorse and zero insight into the killings.”
“She just basically said, ‘They drove me to do this.’”
Betty, now 71, was previously denied parole in 2010.
