IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2 Heads Back to 1935 for the Bradley Gang Massacre

HBO has officially renewed IT: Welcome to Derry for a second season, and after spending its first chapter in 1962, the series is jumping backward another 27 years.

Season 2 will take place in 1935, during the Great Depression, and center on the Bradley Gang massacre, one of the bloodier pieces of Derry history Stephen King tucked into IT. Andy and Barbara Muschietti will return as executive producers, with Brad Caleb Kane continuing as showrunner.

The renewal itself isn't much of a surprise. The first season was a major success for HBO, and its finale made the show's intentions pretty damn clear by identifying what we'd just watched as Chapter One. The creative team had also been talking about a larger plan for the series almost from the beginning.

What we didn't have until now was HBO actually saying, “Yes, go make the thing.”

And now they have.

The Bradley Gang Is Coming to Derry

The next chapter is built around the Bradley Gang, a group of violent bank robbers who arrive in Derry looking to buy ammunition and discover that they've picked one hell of a bad town for a shopping trip.

In King's novel, the gang's story is part of the collection of historical interludes that gradually reveal just how long something has been wrong with Derry. Their time in town ends with local residents ambushing them in a brutal shootout — while something much stranger appears to be watching from the sidelines.

Andy Muschietti previously explained that the series won't simply recreate those few pages from the book. The Bradley Gang incident is being expanded into a full story with its own characters and arcs, with the massacre serving as a major event rather than a piece of background history.

That approach feels like the entire reason Welcome to Derry works as a series. King left behind decades of horrible little stories about this town, many of them only briefly explored in IT. HBO has an enormous amount of material sitting there waiting to be pulled apart and expanded.

Derry During the Great Depression

Moving from 1962 to 1935 also gives Season 2 an opportunity to feel completely different from what came before it.

The United States was deep in the Great Depression. Poverty, desperation and social unrest were everywhere, and Muschietti has already said the series intends to deal directly with the uglier realities of that period rather than using the 1930s as little more than production design.

That's some fertile ground for an entity that feeds on fear.

The first season established that Pennywise isn't simply waking up, killing a bunch of people and disappearing every 27 years. Whatever It is doing in Derry is tangled into the town itself, and moving backward through these cycles gives the series a chance to keep uncovering how deep that connection actually goes.

The plan has been to tell that story in reverse.

Season 1 took us to 1962. Season 2 goes to 1935. The previously discussed third chapter would move back another 27 years to 1908, giving the show three different periods of Derry history while moving closer and closer to the origins of the nightmare.

HBO hasn't ordered that third chapter yet, but the second part of the plan is now official.

Pennywise Isn't Finished Yet

There hasn't been a full Season 2 casting announcement yet, so exactly who will be making the trip back to 1935 still has to be confirmed.

But there's one character Welcome to Derry can carry through every era without having to explain why he hasn't aged a day.

Pennywise.

Bill Skarsgård's return has not yet been formally detailed as part of the renewal announcement, but the entire structure of the series revolves around the creature's previous cycles in Derry. Season 1 also opened the door much wider on Pennywise, Bob Gray and the mythology surrounding It than either of Muschietti's movies ever had time to do.

Now we're going backward again.

Different decade. Different people. Different Derry.

Same fucking clown.