Warrior, a historical action drama based on an idea by late martial arts legend Bruce Lee, started life on Cinemax, where it aired two blisteringly good seasons to way less fanfare than it deserved. Cinemax canceled the show, but it was picked up by Max, which aired a third season last year, again to way less fanfare than it deserved.
After that, Max canceled the show again, and this time it may stick...but wait! As of last weekend, the first three seasons of Warrior were available to watch on Netflix and gained good reviews from people on social media. When I saw the show was on Netflix a couple of days ago, it was at the number 6 spot in the top 10 most watched shows list. When I checked just now, it was in the number 5 spot. Progress!
Back when it was first announced that Warrior was coming to Netflix, star Jason Tobin — who plays the hot-headed gang leader Young Jun — took to Twitter to encourage Netflix to "greenlight S4 before we're a humongous hit in your platform!" Is it possible for Warrior to come back yet another time? If there's any show that deserves it, it's this one.
Tobin isn't the only cast member mulling the idea of another revival. Speaking to IGN, star Olivia Cheng — who plays the business-minded madam Ah Toy — sounds like she wants at least one more round to finish the story. “There’s a part of all of us artistically that a second go because we don’t feel satisfied with what we experienced in Season 3,” Cheng said (season 3 ended on some major cliffhangers). “If we’re going to say goodbye, we really want to say goodbye on our terms.”
Cheng even has ideas about what she'd like to see in a fourth season, including a confrontation between Ah Toy and Dylan Leary, the head-busting Irish union boss played by Dean Jagger. The two characters have brushed against each other a couple of times but have never had it out proper. “Dean thinks Ah Toy is the most dangerous one,” Cheng said. “It’d be interesting to finally have scenes with Dean where it’s Ah Toy versus Leary. It’s kind of setting the stage, maybe, for that.”
Warrior star reveals why Penelope Blake and Sophie Mercer were missing from season 3
Cheng also answered a question I was wondering: in season 3, the show completely cut out the characters of Penelope Blake and Sophie Mercer, sisters played by Joanna Vanderham and Céline Buckens. Both of them were pretty dug into the narrative, so it was confusing that they were nowhere to be seen last season. Apparently, the writers had a “whole kick-ass storyline” planned for them, but outside forces interfered.
“The Blake sisters were a casualty of the second corporate merger that kicked in as we were about to start production,” Cheng explained, probably referring to the 2022 merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery, which happened around a year after it was announced that the show was making the jump from Cinemax to HBO Max. Vanderham and Buckens were “literally getting their fittings in London” when the merger was finalized. “They are so beloved by the Warrior family,” Cheng added. If the show returns, she wants them back in the mix.
“This is our chance to have that time with each other, and it’s our chance to do right by Bruce Lee,” Cheng finished. “It’s the Year of the Dragon. Maybe the timing of this is fortuitous in a way that we could never have contrived.”
"We want the audiences to get swept up in our world, in the humanity and the absolute flaws and contradictions of all our characters. To just fall in love with us, and fall in love with the world that we have gone into painstaking detail to create."
I would be thrilled if Warrior got to come back for one more season and end things proper. If you haven't seen the show, I recommend you check it out on Netflix, and then I recommend you tell everyone you know about it.
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