‘Looking’ season 2 official: HBO renews Jonathan Groff series after marked improvement

It looks like you better be looking for more “Looking” in 2015. (Yes, we totally see what we did there.) The series, which is about three friends (Jonathan Groff’s Patrick, Frankie J. Alvarez’s Agustin and Murray Bartlett’s Dom) dealing with issues of identity and sexuality in San Francisco, will come back for a second season.

HBO confirmed the big news for “Looking” on Wednesday, which is great for everyone who wanted to see a little bit more of the series and the characters in the new year. The next batch of episodes is set to shoot in the Bay area a little later this year, and could be around to premiere for the network in January. Joining the actors above are Lauren Weedman (Doris), Raul Castillo (Richie) and Russell Tovey (Kevin), who are each being promoted to series regular status after being recurring players for most of the show’s first season.

At first, “Looking” did not get off to a great start with under 400,000 viewers, but it has improved in recent weeks. The show is well-received by critics, and its real strength, like many other HBO shows these days, are the total views across various platforms, including On Demand and the HBO GO app. It has received around two million viewers a week when you include all of those, and as word of mouth increases, more and more people could check the show out.

This news does clump “Looking” in with “Getting On,” another HBO comedy with a smaller audience that received another season recently. If only other networks were this supportive to shows just starting out and trying to find their place, the television landscape would be so much more welcoming to content creators.

Happy about the renewal for “Looking”? Share below, and visit the link here if you want to get some more TV news from us weekly via our CarterMatt Newsletter.

Photo: HBO