The screen opens on absolute black and the slow, deliberate tick of a grandfather clock that somehow sounds wet, like it’s counting heartbeats instead of seconds, then a woman’s whisper slithers directly into your skull (Helen Mirren’s Cordelia Rothmere, voice aged in bourbon and betrayal) saying “You all assumed someone took it, nobody ever asked who put it somewhere,” and before the sentence has even finished the Rothmere crest appears in molten gold only to freeze mid-drip and fracture into a thousand hairline cracks that spiderweb across the screen while the music drops to a single cello note held so low it feels like the building itself is growling.

Forty-seven seconds in, Cordelia walks the midnight corridors of the Hudson Valley estate in a silk robe the colour of dried blood, stops beneath her dead husband’s portrait, presses a panel nobody knew existed, and the entire library wall swings inward to reveal the missing $4.8 billion sitting exactly where it has always been (bearer bonds still crisp, Krugerrands still gleaming, canvases still breathing), untouched by any thief because there was never a thief, only a matriarch who decided her children were no longer worthy of inheriting the air they breathed, and the look on Helen Mirren’s face when she realises the camera has caught her secret is the single most devastating piece of acting ever committed to a television trailer, a moment so raw that grown critics in the screening room audibly gasped and one actually dropped her phone.

Then Jonathan Bailey’s voice, velvet wrapped around broken glass, floats over footage of him standing on a sun-bleached Maltese cliff, alive, bearded, sunburned, eyes burning with four billion dollars’ worth of resurrection, saying “You wanted to punish us for existing, congratulations, Mother, you just murdered your own legacy,” and the internet collectively lost the ability to form coherent sentences because the golden boy who supposedly died in a yacht explosion has clearly spent the last year planning something that makes succession look like a polite game of musical chairs.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge appears with a platinum buzz-cut sharp enough to perform surgery, seven months pregnant and smirking like the baby is already billing by the hour, delivering the line “I sold the secret to the highest bidder; turns out the highest bidder was me” while pouring 1961 Pétrus into a hospital-grade breast pump, and somewhere in the background Oscar Isaac is burning documents that clearly show Cordelia’s signature authorising the hiding of her own fortune while Anya Taylor-Joy films the entire thing on a Super 8 camera that catches, for exactly one frame, the reflection of a girl who looks disturbingly like the still-missing Lilly Sullivan from the Canadian case that has haunted the world for seven years, an Easter egg so deranged that the subreddit dedicated to it crashed within six minutes of the trailer going live.

Bill Nighy swans in as Augustus Rothmere’s secret identical twin who has apparently been living in a Swiss clinic under the name “Patient Zero” for forty years, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor strides into frame as the federal prosecutor who realises the money never left the country because it never needed to, and Tom Hollander plays both the British and American family lawyers simultaneously, finishing each other’s sentences in different accents while trying to bankrupt the other, all of it set to a score that starts as Chopin and ends as the sound of an empire having its throat cut very, very slowly.

The final shot is the entire cast assembled in the newly revealed vault, Cordelia in the centre holding a single gold Krugerrand that she lets fall, and as it spins in slow motion we see every face reflected in it (Julian smiling like the devil just offered him a partnership, Beatrice cradling her belly like it contains the next hostile takeover, Victor striking a match off a bearer bond, Daphne zooming in until the lens cracks) and when the coin finally hits the marble floor the sound is not a clink but a gunshot, the screen slams to black, white text appears: 9 JANUARY 2026, ALL EPISODES AT ONCE, followed by a single line in Cordelia’s handwriting that fades in like blood in water: “The vault was never robbed. It was a tomb. And I locked the door from the inside.”

The trailer ends, the lights come up, and 87 million people realise they have just watched the precise moment an entire dynasty signs its own death warrant while smiling for the camera, and January suddenly feels a thousand years away and tomorrow at the same time, because The Old Money Season 2 is no longer about who stole the fortune; it is about what happens when the people who were supposed to inherit the world discover their mother buried it alive just to watch them dig.