BTS: Jim Field Smith on Hijack Series 2

The second season of Apple TV’s Hijack relocates its real-time thriller format from the sealed environment of an aircraft to the complex, subterranean infrastructure of Berlin’s U-Bahn system. Across eight episodes unfolding minute by minute, the series places a hijacked underground train at the centre of a multi-jurisdictional crisis, combining large-scale logistical stakes with close-quarters character drama.

Idris Elba returns as Sam Nelson, reprising the role that earned him an Emmy nomination, while also continuing as executive producer. Series 2 reunites Elba with returning cast members Christine Adams and Max Beesley, and introduces a new ensemble including Toby Jones, Christiane Paul, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Lisa Vicari and Christian Näthe.

Here, showrunner Jim Field Smith discusses the technical and creative challenges of evolving the real-time format, expanding the series’ physical and visual language, and delivering one of Apple TV’s most ambitious international dramas.

The eight-episode second season will premiere globally on Wednesday, January 14, 2026, with the first episode, followed by one episode weekly until March 4

Jim Field Smith – Creator, Executive Producer and Lead Director

For over four years, my working life has been dedicated to every aspect of Hijack – from its earliest conception through to delivering that vision on screen. Coming to the show from both the creative and technical sides has been crucial on a large project of this nature – one where story, performance and execution are inseparable.

The first season was a tightly wound, real-time thriller unfolding across seven relentless hours aboard a hijacked aircraft. With no ellipses, no time jumps and no narrative safety net, and an entirely contained precinct, the format left nowhere to hide. So we were delighted that when it premiered on Apple TV in 2023, it became a breakout hit, capturing global audiences and earning Idris Elba an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor. It was particularly gratifying to see the show being praised for its innovation, sustained tension and character-driven approach – three areas we had pained so much over.

Making the show was exhilarating, exhausting and, frankly, slightly insane. The success of that first season made a follow-up sound like a logical move, but the whole creative team – including Idris – were adamant that we should only return if we could find a way that genuinely felt right. The challenge wasn’t whether the format could work again, but how we could push it somewhere new. We didn’t want to come back for the sake of it; we needed a strong motivation for Sam Nelson himself to be back, to give us the motivation to bring him back. Our initial question was spatial as much as dramatic. Where could we place the story that would give us the same intense confinement, but open up a different world? That search led me to think in opposites. If season one took place 35,000 feet up in the blue skies, what would its inverse look like? That line of thinking took me to an underground train – another enclosed environment, but one embedded beneath a living city rather than floating isolated above it. This location offered a fundamentally different logistical and visual challenge: a moving system with frequent stops, multiple access points, intersecting routes and an unpredictable rhythm. And then, as always for me, it became about specificity – it needed to be a city that was alien to Sam, and ideally one that brought its own character to the show. A city with a strong visual identity, and a history and culture that would inform the story. This ultimately narrowed it down to one particular place. A place where I had lived as a child.

And so we find ourselves, at the start of season two, in wintry Berlin – as Sam boards a U-Bahn train, while pursuing a lead connected to his past. What begins as a routine commute filled with unfortunate coincidence gradually reveals itself to be a constructed crisis. Although the show again unfolds in real time, the audience’s relationship with Sam has shifted. He is not simply a passenger forced to react, and the format no longer simply heightens suspense; it traps the audience inside Sam’s moral uncertainty, forcing them to sit with his decisions as he navigates this maze.

A subway system is exactly that — not singular but networked, a vast labyrinth beneath a living city. The ticking clock also functions differently. In season one, the pressure is linear and externally imposed – fuel, distance, altitude. An underground train offers a different rhythm, a more volatile tension curve, where danger escalates in bursts rather than along a single trajectory. The train becomes the story, and vice versa. It accelerates, brakes, diverts and halts. It moves through darkness and light, above ground and below, into stations filled with commuters and back into isolation.

This allowed us to expand the narrative geography while keeping the experience grounded and claustrophobic. The stakes are higher, the scale more ambitious, with hundreds of lives moving through an interconnected system – but the storytelling remains intimate. We’re still trapped with the characters, just now in a space that feels darker, dirtier and far less controlled.

Achieving that sense of reality on screen relied heavily on close collaboration across departments, all aligned around the idea that the realism was not just an aesthetic ambition but fundamental to the drama. I wanted this new season to feel physically and emotionally lived-in, as if the camera had dropped into a real crisis and refused to leave.

Working again with cinematographer Ed Moore was central to establishing that language. Ed shares my instinct to make heightened drama feel observational rather than staged. His camera doesn’t comment on the action; it inhabits it. The lens is close, reactive and occasionally off-balance, mirroring the emotional state of the characters. In a real-time thriller, that’s critical — if the camerawork insists itself on the viewer, the tension dissipates.

Because Ed and I have developed a long-standing shorthand, we were able to be brave with restraint. We avoided flashy moves and visual gimmicks, focusing instead on proximity: how close the camera could realistically get, how long it could stay on a face, and how movement through the carriage could feel incidental rather than choreographed. The result is a visual grammar that aims to supports the illusion that this world exists independently of the camera.

That realism extended across all departments. Dominic Roberts’ resourceful production design delivered a U-Bahn carriage and network infrastructure that felt genuinely functional and worn, rather than “designed.” Cynthia Lawrence-John’s costumes avoided high stylisation, favouring muted, lived-in palettes appropriate to a morning commute and to the real world of Berlin, while Jojo Williams’ hair and makeup tracked fatigue and stress minute by minute, allowing faces to subtly change as time passes. In post production, lead editor David Webb builds a grammar of pace and rhythm that sustains the illusion of real time whilst also cleverly compressing and expanding subjectively with the characters own perspective of the events unfolding. Anne Nikitin’s score enhances the dread and perhaps more importantly grounds the show with real emotion — whilst our sound team under Joe Beale at Boom create a sonic world that is both forensically accurate and also psychologically playful. Our VFX department led by Reece Ewing invisibly bring the environment to life, where it wasn’t possible in camera, and seamlessly blend the worlds of constructed sets, locations and aerial photography, all with the added complication of realistic looking snow. Together, these choices reinforce a single idea: this is a real place, under sustained pressure.

At the centre of it all is a character under the microscope. Real-time drama is unforgiving when it comes to performance. There’s nowhere to hide and no editorial release valve. Every reaction has to feel authentic, because the audience is living each decision alongside the characters. Idris’ return as Sam Nelson leans into stillness as much as action. This time around he is quieter, more fractured, harder to read. He is a broken man, pushed into desperation. Directing that meant trusting restraint, allowing looks, pauses and physical exhaustion to carry meaning. In extreme, time-critical situations, people don’t deliver speeches; they hesitate, misjudge and adapt. That’s where truth lives.

What ultimately excites me most about this second season of Hijack is that we’ve been able to use the success and shorthand of season one to drive the show somewhere darker and riskier. Sam Nelson is no longer a stabilising force but a destabilising one. The real-time format doesn’t simply track events; it interrogates intent, consequence and moral compromise minute by minute, second by second.

If the audience feels sustained unease, the sense that one wrong decision could tip everything into disaster, if they’re edging forward in their seats – then the world we built, together, is doing its job.