Four secrets of TV shows that avoided the series-two ratings slump.

Few TV shows in recent years have landed with the sort of impact as The Handmaid’s Tale last spring. Its phenomenal success was assisted by the story’s prescience – a far-right fundamentalist theocracy where women and minorities are stripped of all rights – in the early months of Mr Donald Trump’s presidency. Nonetheless, expectations for season two, which arrives on US screens this month and in the UK next month, are running high, as are concerns that it might be a catastrophe. Season one ended exactly as the novel did. Season two will, necessarily, depart from the source material. If it does turn out to be a disaster, it would not be the first. Second season syndrome can be the death knell for even the most successful television show. True Detective, anyone? Here’s how to avoid the perilous pitfalls.

Keep the original creator close

Ms Margaret Atwood, who penned her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in 1984, works closely as a consultant on the award-winning show. “She’s a huge part of the process,” says Ms Elisabeth Moss, the show’s star and producer. “She has read and given us her blessing on every single script.” With the grande dame of dystopia’s eyes on those scripts, who would dare deviate too far from the world she created?

Other authors decide to head up the writer’s room themselves. Mr Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers, was an executive producer on the HBO adaptation, whose second season stood head and shoulders above the first. Mr Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 9/11 tome The Looming Tower, has also transposed it for screen. The first season is now showing on Amazon, with a second in the pipeline.

Amp up the secondary characters

The first season of a television show should set out its stall, establishing the hero, the villain, the particular struggle. The best second seasons then explore the supporting characters, too, and lend more weight to their storylines. Lost’s second season gave new focus to Ben Linus, played by Mr Michael Emerson, season two of Billions elevated the role of Wags (Mr David Costabile), right-hand man to Bobby Axelrod (Mr Damian Lewis), and The West Wing gave more time, and rightly so, to CJ, Ms Allison Janney’s glorious comic relief. The Crown’s masterful second season gave more weight to Princess Margaret than its first (of course, its writers had actual history to help out there), while The Affair told the story from four perspectives, instead of just two. Sadly, for the latter, it has all been downhill from there.

Don’t get complacent

“The biggest obstacle to a season two is season one,” says Mr Bruce Miller, showrunner on The Handmaid’s Tale. After the wild success of True Detective, its highly anticipated second season was an indulgent and underwhelming damp squib. BBC One’s Doctor Foster was similarly disappointing, veering off into clichéd territory with Ms Suranne Jones’s cuckolded mess of a GP booty-calling her son’s teacher and raving in a small-town nightclub. Maintaining the tension of a mystery or thriller beyond one sleek, tight season can prove particularly tricky. We’re looking at you Borgen, Broadchurch, The Killing, The Fall…

If in doubt, chuck it out and just tell a whole new story

Can’t figure out how to follow up a barnstorming season one? Change the period, switch location, draft in a whole new cast and call it An Anthology. Season two of Mr Noah Hawley’s dark, weird Fargo wound the action back to the 1970s and told a tangentially related, but totally different, story from the first. Mr Ryan Murphy, master of the anthology, creates a new world each season in American Horror Story and is following the same model with American Crime Story – first Mr OJ Simpson, then Mr Gianni Versace – and now Feud. How to follow up season one’s vicious Hollywood spat between Ms Bette Davies and Ms Joan Crawford? Three words: Charles versus Diana.