The new USA drama White Collar has been picked up for a second season, creator Jeff Eastin confirmed via Twitter on Friday.
“White Collar season 2 pickup is official! Congratulations to the best cast and crew on television,” Eastin posted on the social networking site.
This comes only a few weeks after Eastin tweeted that White Collar was being ‘rethought’ after the cliffhanger of the show’s seventh episode, “Free Fall,” which ended with the apparent betrayal of Neal Caffrey (played by Matt Bomer) by Special Agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay), who had been working together with Caffrey to solve white-collar crimes.
Eastin assured his Twitter followers that not everything was what it seemed with the ending. USA, however, had thought about changing the entire direction of the season due to a little bit of audience backlash, which Eastin dismissed as only ‘10%’ of the viewers, while the other 90% were ‘positive’ about the episode’s ending.
USA is apparently feeling positive as well, considering the show’s renewal. “Free Fall” hit a series high for the show, with 5.55 million viewers, airing immediately after the series finale of USA’s well-known show Monk. USA has not released any statements regarding the renewal of the series, but it’s hard not to believe Eastin (if anyone would know, he would).
White Collar will resume in January for the rest of its season. Its eighth episode, “Hard Sell,” will air on January 19, 2010. It will return in on a new and different night; it will be moving from its Friday slot to a slot on Tuesday night as a result of USA’s massive programming change-around that will be orchestrated when the season picks back up (Burn Notice and Psych have also shifted nights). Seven more episodes of the series’ fourteen episode first-season will air, eventually wrapping up in mid-March. Season two of White Collar is expected to premiere next fall.
