The drama series Resurrection presents its audience with a provocative and challenging story: loved ones who return from the dead, seemingly unchanged from the day they died.
But it also presents the great conundrum of the modern TV mystery drama. That is, "the fear is that we don't know [why] and are stringing you along," says executive producer Michelle Fazekas.
"But there is an answer. The show is not only about the answer ... It's about these characters and how this affects them".
The challenge, then, is how quickly that mystery is unfurled, and what clues are given along the way.
To Resurrection's credit, it didn't over-promise or under-deliver.
Co-executive producer Aaron Zelman last year said audiences wouldn't get a "definitive answer" by the end of the show's first season. On that point, they delivered.
Zelman also foreshadowed a darker tone to the show's second season. "We won't open right at the end of season one, we come in about a week later," he said. "Things have happened in town ... that will take things in a darker direction for season two."
The author of the book on which the US series is based, Jason Mott, said he questioned many of his friends while he wrote the manuscript for the book, asking how they would react if loved ones who had died suddenly returned.
"Usually people were very excited to hear about it, saying they would love to have so and so back," he said. "Then I would follow up with what would happen a year later ... [and] sometimes the answers became really complicated."
Among the season two additions to the show's cast are Michelle Fairley, who plays the grandmother of Jacob, the little boy who returned to his family in the small American town of Arcadia, Missouri.
Zelman describes Fairley's character as "the mother-in-law from hell, literally."
There is also a suggestion that the town may be beset by a mystery illness. "When people come back from the past, sometimes they bring not-so-good things, including viruses that haven't been around for a while," Zelman teased.
"It may not be true that they are spreading something all over the place, but (there is) the fear that they could. What does that do to how people feel about the Returned?"
The first season ran only for eight episodes, and for the second only 13 have been commissioned. It plays more like a "limited" or "event" series than a full, 22-episode network drama.
Zelman says the second season will also tease out bigger mysteries about the town of Arcadia itself.
"When this town was under the aegis of this powerful family, it was doing quite well, but Henry (Kurtwood Smith) lost his son and he let the factory go down and the town to a certain degree went with it," Zelman said. "Can he bring it back? There are ways in which the past being now present in the town can breathe new life into the town."
Resurrection, Seven, Sunday, 9pm
