Late in the second season premiere of Black Doves, the darkly comic Netflix spy thriller starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw, veteran spymaster Reed, played by the great Sarah Lancashire, warns Knightley's deep cover operative Helen to stay sharp. "It's a wonderful game, all this," Reed says wearily, "but the rules keep changing. It gets harder to keep up."
In its second season, Black Doves is much harder to keep up with. It's not because its rules keep changing, though. It's that it's been so damn long since we last saw the show.
Season one of the series, created by Joe Barton(*), debuted on December 5, 2024. The second season premiered today, which means we're exactly one month shy of two years in between seasons. Even though waits of two or more years between seasons have become depressingly commonplace in the TV business post-COVID, 23 months is still much, much, much too long for a relatively small show like Black Doves.
(*) If you enjoy Black Doves, by the way, I strongly recommend trying Barton's previous series, Giri/Haji, which is also on Netflix, starring Takehiro Hira and Kelly Macdonald as a Tokyo detective and a London detective who reluctantly team up. Like Black Doves, it blends a lot of different tones and genres, and Macdonald is of course wonderful.