Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took after HBO dropped the one-line renewal announcement for the entire internet to detonate. Fourteen minutes for #OldMoneyS2 to claw its way to global number one, for the Season 1 finale clip of Helen Mirren staring into an empty vault to be rewatched forty-one million times, for private-jet stocks to spike seven percent because every producer in Hollywood suddenly needed to be in Vancouver yesterday.

And the people who have actually read the first two scripts? They speak in the hushed, trembling tones usually reserved for war correspondents who’ve seen too much. One executive producer, voice low as if the walls themselves might be wired by the Rothmeres, told me, “Season 1 was the champagne toast. Season 2 is when someone spikes the champagne with cyanide and the entire family keeps sipping because spitting would be vulgar.”

This isn’t television anymore. This is class warfare served on inherited Limoges, and the Rothmeres have stopped pretending they’re on the same side.

Season 1 ended thirty-six hours ago in story time, and the temperature has already plunged to absolute zero. The vault that was supposed to hold $4.8 billion in bearer bonds, black-market antiquities, and enough dirty laundry to choke a dry cleaner is empty, not robbed, empty, because someone inside the bloodline moved the money while the rest of them were busy smiling for the society pages. The suspicion that has been simmering for eight episodes has curdled into certainty, and certainty, in the Rothmere universe, is the most dangerous substance known to man.

Helen Mirren’s Cordelia no longer glides through the Hudson Valley estate like a battleship in pearls. She stalks it like a dying queen who has decided the entire kingdom will accompany her into the grave. Insiders say Mirren asked for fewer close-ups this season, not out of vanity, but because she wanted the camera pulled back far enough to capture the bodies dropping. There is a scene in episode three where she fires three board members, disowns a grandchild, and poisons a dog before the caterers have even served the amuse-bouche, and somehow, impossibly, you still find yourself rooting for her, because Mirren has reached that rare altitude where evil becomes hypnotic.

Jonathan Bailey spent the hiatus doing survival training in Patagonia so he could return as Julian looking like a man who has learned to field-dress a deer and dismantle a trust fund with the same cold efficiency. He is no longer the charming wastrel who blew up his own yacht for insurance money. He is the ghost who crawled out of the Mediterranean with salt in his lungs and receipts in his teeth. When he finally comes face-to-face with Cordelia in the derelict boathouse, waves exploding against the pilings like applause for his resurrection, he doesn’t scream. He simply smiles the smile of a man who has spent a year sharpening every grudge into a stiletto and says, “You wrote me out of the will, Mother. I brought a pen.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has shaved her head platinum and weaponised her pregnancy the way lesser actresses weaponise tears. She walks into boardrooms glowing with the serene menace of a woman carrying a hostile takeover in her uterus, pops a prenatal vitamin like it’s cyanide, and announces that the next generation of Rothmeres will be ethical, sustainable, and funded entirely by blood diamonds she personally laundered through a children’s charity. Her Bea has become the family’s final boss, unpredictable, pregnant, and smiling like she’s already won.

Oscar Isaac’s Victor Liang has stopped pretending he was ever adopted. He was annexed. Season 2 is his decolonisation arc, complete with actual fire. There is a bathtub scene, Dom Pérignon fizzing around stacks of burning documents, where he finally says the quiet part out loud: the family never loved him, they simply needed a minority face for the annual report. The camera lingers on the flames reflected in his eyes, and you realise the money wasn’t the only thing they kept in the vault.

Anya Taylor-Joy’s Daphne has traded fragility for footage. She films everything now on a Super 8 that looks like it was stolen from a David Lynch estate sale, and by episode five she has enough material to destroy Christmas for the next four decades. She is no longer the baby of the family. She is the archivist of its apocalypse.

New faces slide into the frame like ice picks. Bill Nighy arrives as Augustus Rothmere’s secret identical twin, a man who has spent forty years collecting stamps and buying the family’s debt in complete silence, waiting for the exact moment to foreclose on their souls. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor storms the estate as the Assistant U.S. Attorney who realises the money never left the country, it simply changed hands within the bloodline, and she walks through those marble halls like she already owns them, because by episode eight she basically does. Tilda Swinton floats in as Cordelia’s former sister-in-law, a deposed European royal carrying Polaroids that make the Panama Papers look like a kindergarten art project.

The scripts are so vicious that even the extras are in therapy. Episode four has been banned from table reads if anyone in the room has a heart condition. There is a Thanksgiving episode that one writer will only describe as “a war crime with cranberry sauce.” The violence is never physical, this is still HBO, not slasher porn, but financial, emotional, and, most terrifying of all, legal. Lines of dialogue function like cluster bombs in a trust fund. Someone says, “You want my blessing? I buried that with your father’s humanity,” and another character replies, “Good. Dig it up. I need something to poison the board with,” and the silence that follows is so complete you can hear the Dow Jones drop.

The budget has ballooned to eighteen million dollars an episode, more than the GDP of several former Soviet republics. They shut down the Place Vendôme for one night. They flew the cast to Mustique to film two characters screaming on a beach that costs eighty-five thousand dollars a night to rent. They built a full-scale replica of the Rothmere vault and filled it with real gold bars just so the reflections would look expensive enough. One set decorator was given a single instruction: make it look like money is having a panic attack.

Fall 2026 feels like a lifetime away, and HBO is treating the wait like psychological warfare. There is a limited-edition Rothmere Reserve whisky aged in barrels that once held blackmail letters. There is a Manhattan speakeasy where the password is your net worth. There is an alternate-reality game that lets fans “inherit” pieces of the missing fortune, and the top prize is dinner with Helen Mirren and the legal right to ask her one question she must answer honestly. Forty thousand people have already sold plasma to enter.

Critics who have seen the first three episodes emerge pale, shaking, and strangely aroused. One compared it to “watching a diamond-encrusted guillotine fall in slow motion.” A network executive admitted, off-record and slightly drunk, “We thought Succession was brutal. Succession was a hug compared to this.”

And Helen Mirren herself, spotted leaving the Vancouver set in full Cordelia regalia, paused just long enough to look at a cluster of shell-shocked extras and say, with the sweetest smile in the Northern Hemisphere, “Darlings, smile. We’re only getting started.”

Old Money Season 2 isn’t coming back. It’s coming for blood. And when it arrives in Fall 2026, the one percent won’t be the only ones bleeding. We’ll all be on our knees, begging for the next betrayal.