Editor's note: The below interview contains major spoilers for Season 2 of Sweet Magnolias.The romantic drama series Sweet Magnolias, adapted from the long-running novels of the same name by author Sherryl Woods, follows the lives of three women (who have also been each other's best friends since childhood) living in the small town of Serenity, South Carolina — and all of the entertaining hijinks that ensue when everyone knows everyone else's business. Maddie Townsend (JoAnna Garcia) is coming off of a divorce from her husband Bill (Chris Klein) and finding new love with Ty Maddox (Justin Bruening), former professional baseball player and coach of the high school baseball team. Dana Sue Sullivan (Brooke Elliott), a professional chef and owner of her own restaurant, is currently dealing with not only having her estranged husband Ronnie (Brandon Quinn) back in town but also an unexpected love interest in local farmer Jeremy (Chase Anderson). Successful attorney Helen Decatur (Heather Headley) is nursing her own heartbreak after her on-again off-again boyfriend Ryan (Michael Shenefelt) leaves Serenity, but could she have a new suitor in Sullivan's sous chef Erik (Dion Johnstone)? And that doesn't even scratch the surface of all the drama going on with the supporting cast!
Ahead of the premiere of Season 2, Collider had the chance to speak with showrunner Sheryl J. Anderson about the Netflix series. Over the course of the conversation, which you can read below, Anderson breaks down some of the season's most pivotal moments — including the newest and most surprising romances (Annie and Jackson, anyone?), the inspiration behind Helen's storyline (and how Headley herself came up with the idea), and when they knew the identity of Isaac's birth parents. She also discusses how that ending proposal might impact Helen and Erik's relationship, the deeper issues that came to the forefront for Cal this season, and the identity of that mystery blonde in the finale.
Collider: I cannot wait for everybody to see Season 2. I feel like it's going to be a needed balm right now. I don't know if that's a little hyperbolic.
SHERYL J. ANDERSON: When we dropped in Season 1, Heather Headley said, "I think we are a balm for this particular Gilead." And certainly, when we were shooting Season 2, we hoped the world would look different when Season 2 dropped, but we are happy to be balm again. We want to bring people joy and comfort and a couple of "What?" moments along the way.
There are definitely some of those, especially in the finale. I want to touch on that for sure. But I would love to start at the beginning with the resolution of the cliffhanger from last season, which is, obviously, the identity of who was in the car. Did you have that question answered already before Season 2 started, or were there a couple of potential picks for who it was going to be?
ANDERSON: I am always worried about setting something up and not knowing the payoff. So we absolutely knew who was in the car, though it became a running joke while we were shooting [Season] 1 and when we first started writing 2, like, "Watch it, because I can change who's in the car." But yeah, we knew who was going to be in the car when we wrote [Episode] 110, because we wanted to make sure that it was organic so that when people find out who it is, nobody was like, "Hey, wait."
It didn't feel like a bait-and-switch.
ANDERSON: Exactly, exactly. We want to be honest with the audience so that they'll relax and fully open their hearts to the show, and so we try to do that everywhere. We keep a secret here and there, but we always want to be honest in the revelation of those secrets.
I feel like most of my questions for you have to do with the romance of this show. The Dana Sue/Jeremy/Ronnie of it all, for starters. What fueled the decision behind her saying goodbye to Jeremy, who I think some people were kind of excited about, and deciding to see if she could make things work with Ronnie?
ANDERSON: We all love Jeremy. Chase Anderson is a fabulous actor and when we were writing Season 2, there was a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. "Does he have to go? Do you have to go now?" But part of it was that we wanted to acknowledge Dana Sue's desire to be careful about judgment. And Season 2 is a season about forgiveness and the fact that she was working toward... first, trying to understand what went wrong and then exploring whether she could ever forgive that. We thought [it] was a really interesting journey for her and an important journey for her, not just as a wife, but also as a mother.
Jeremy... Jeremy may have stepped away, but if we get to come back, I would love to explore Jeremy still being in the community. How hard it is to run into an old lover on the street. But really, what won the day for Ronnie was just the fact that Dana Sue and Ronnie needed to acknowledge there was still a lot of passion and a lot of love. Yes, mistakes were made, but we all make mistakes and at some point, you have to decide was this enough That's why we wanted to take them through the exploration of why did this happen, and is that something we can fix so it doesn't happen again — but also is passion enough?
I like that we see them going to counseling. I think Dana Sue especially has a little trouble with what that brings to the surface for her, but then it allows her to confront Ronnie probably really for the first time. The scene where she surprises him with the truck, and he's almost afraid to accept it? It was really interesting to see them actively trying to work on their marriage as opposed to, "We're just going to get back together and everything's going to be the way that it was." You see the struggle.
ANDERSON: You also see the investment that allows them to stay in the struggle, and I love that scene too. That moment where he almost breaks as he says, "I've been pushing so hard for a yes because I didn't want to let you say no." I think that we can all identify with that. You get so locked in to "I've got to achieve this goal. I can't hear no. I've got to achieve this." When somebody says yes, you're like, "Wait, what?" Brandon [Quinn] does such a beautiful job and Brooke [Elliott] does a wonderful job too of going from happiness to compassion to concern. It's a complicated relationship, and it's a complicated moment, but our cast is so wonderful and everybody's so talented and able to go down those extra layers. My hope is that everybody sitting on their sofas at home will be sniffling as loudly as I was in video village when they filmed it.
I want to talk about Helen's journey this season, her desire to become a mother and what we see happen for her, which is a story that I think a lot of women and people who are trying to have children biologically can relate to. What made it the right time to have this storyline for her, specifically?
ANDERSON: In all honesty, because it's a rupture point for Ryan and Helen at the end of Season 1, Heather [Headley] came to me and said, "I would love to explore this if you think it's worth exploring." And I was like, "Yes, ma'am, let's do it." When we were talking about it in the room, as we started digging into Season 2, we had women in the room who had miscarriages or multiple miscarriages, who'd been through IVF, who were poised at a moment in their lives where they don't have a partner, they're thinking about IVF on their own. So not only did Heather have a great idea, [but] I had a room filled with a variety of experiences and a variety of tapes. I thought it was a great mix of people and experiences and things that we wanted to share to take her on that road, and she's amazing.
I was so happy to finally see Helen and Erik finally getting together. It's a little more slow-burn than some of the other romances on this show. It seems like he's letting her set the pace of what she's comfortable with, not pushing for anything. That's juxtaposed against her trying to get pregnant again, but then we get more of his backstory too, and why her journey touches him in a way that maybe the two of them weren't anticipating when they started trying to have more of a relationship. But now there might be a little bit of a wrinkle, especially with the season finale. How solid are they as of right now?
ANDERSON: Well, with tongue somewhat in cheek, especially as a romance fan, how solid is any relationship? (laughs) Like you said, he is very patient with her, but then he reveals that maybe part of his patience was just reluctance, and it just looked really good. "No, you set the pace," but it's really, "No, you set the pace because I'm not sure what pace I'm ready for either." Yes, they have something absolutely beautiful together and yes, there are storms ahead, and we'll have to see if they can sail through those storms.
There are relationships that we see blossoming between several generations of characters and one that happens this season is Annie and Jackson. Was that a surprise relationship that blossomed between them, or was there more of a long-term plan to get the two of them together?
ANDERSON: The arc for Annie and Jackson came out of really thinking about how Mary Vaughn raised him and that he's got this loud, brash, obnoxious public face and wondering what might be behind that. And Annie, who has this very introspective, artistic soul, being drawn to his genuine pain and remorse at the top of the season, sees something in him that no one else ever has. He responds to that because that's how he'd like to be seen, but that's not how his parents raised him, so that's just not been anything he's ever explored. Spending time with Annie gives him an opportunity to be the person he would like to be. It'll just be a question of whether he can get there and stay there, and whether other forces on both sides of the equation interfere with their ability to build something genuine.
There are a couple of other threads I definitely want to talk about, and one of them is Noreen having her baby in Serenity. How much of a presence is she going to continue to be, with the baby and living with Isaac, because they have a connection that she doesn't know about yet?
ANDERSON: If we're able to come back for a Season 3, it is one of the things that I would love to explore. [Noreen] wants to spend more time in Serenity because she knows she's harmed people, and she wants to make things right. That absolutely doesn't happen overnight, and I really think that one of the most powerful ways we can make amends is to say, "I know I broke this, how can I fix it?" We don't like easy answers in Serenity because the writers are very interested in grounded, realistic people with grounded, realistic problems.
You really discover things about other people and about yourself when you're trying to make things better, whether that's all coming together to do something fabulous or coming together to say, "This is broken, and it hurt you, it hurt them. I was wrong. How can we fix this? And if we can, how can we do that and how do we come out stronger and better for it on the other side, even if we don't come out of it friends?" But just acknowledging the damage that's been done. We wanted to explore the complexity of what it means to be a friend, a neighbor, a lover, a family member, and a citizen of Serenity, because it's different for everybody. But as we have said from the very beginning, no one in Serenity is beyond redemption. It just takes some people longer to get there.
Isaac's journey this season is something that carried over from Season 1 in trying to find his birth parents. How soon did you know who his parents were? Was that something that was figured out in Season 1? When did you decide would be a good time to reveal all those puzzle pieces?
ANDERSON: We decided that Peggy and Bill were his parents, I think, the second week of the writers' room in Season 1? And when we were shooting Season 1, I told Brittany [L. Smith] and Chris Klein. Told nobody else. There are multiple secrets on our show where until it was revealed to the audience, only the actors whose characters knew the secret were told the secret because you just want actors to feel comfortable playing the information their characters have and nothing else.
That series of interviews in [Episode] 209 was just us having a little fun, ramping up to the reveal. We knew all along, but we also knew that part of the, I hope, fun and excitement for the audience was trying to get there, trying to figure it out. The important thing to us about Isaac's search was... as he tells Helen early on, "I just want to know whose eyes are looking back at me every time I look in the mirror." He loves his adoptive parents. He has a wonderful relationship with them. It's not searching to fill an emptiness. It's a question. But then it turns out to be an answer with bigger ramifications than he had ever imagined that still has nothing to do with how much he loves the parents who raised him but has lots of impact on the community he's decided to be a part of.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the woman who confronts Annie about Dana Sue, and then later shows up on the Instagram gossip account, this is a mystery woman that we do not know, but the Magnolias clearly know. Is there anything you can tease about the identity of this blonde and what threat she could potentially pose?
ANDERSON: I will say this. She is a woman from their shared past who has a score to settle.
That's fair. Is there a plan to reveal who's behind the Serenity Instagram gossip account? Is there already a sense of who that is?
ANDERSON: We know. The writers know who it is. We can't do something unless we have discussed it and arced it out. So the writers know who it is. And God and Netflix willing, we'll get a third season where we can tap into that mystery a little further.
There are many big things that happen in the finale, but among the biggest, I would say, is what happens with Cal. There are things that are dredged up from his past that he would prefer not to be, but then also, he's not going to be the coach anymore. Why did that feel like the move for his character in stepping back from that role, not of his own choosing specifically?
ANDERSON: We wanted to explore the unresolved issues that brought a guy like Cal to a place like Serenity. He's gorgeous and funny and charming and glittery and magnificent, but even he has flaws, and even he has secrets, and we wanted not only Cal to unpack things that he maybe just hacked away instead of dealing with. But also, if we have the opportunity to come back, to explore his responsibility to Maddie and her kids for having come into that relationship without having resolved some pretty deep thing, and wanting to deal with it genuinely because he loves her genuinely. For Maddie, to look at what seems like this glorious sunshine-filled relationship that was restoring her faith and love after Bill and saying, "Even the perfect man isn't perfect." And how that impacts her and her kids and her responsibilities in falling for Cal so quickly. Again, they genuinely love each other and redemption is always possible in Serenity, but a rocky road on the way to a wonderful goal can teach us a lot about each other and ourselves.
Knowing now how much you want to have everything plotted out before it's even introduced, I'm thinking of the scene with Cal and Stu at the benefit. It was hard to say what the ripple effects of that conversation were going to be. This is someone who sees Cal as a larger-than-life figure still, even though Cal himself probably does not feel that way. It feels like there's an unhealthy boundary crossed over in that moment. But also at the same time, Cal has also reached a breaking point because of the Mary Vaughn situation and everything comes to a head. Is this going to be the kind of thing where Cal has to do a lot of personal, individual soul-searching in coming to grips with things that he thought were behind him?
ANDERSON: Well, and to your point, one of the reasons we arrived at Stu was we want heroes, and we want heroes so badly that when we realize they're just human beings, we are so crushed. Cal feels the weight of that, and he feels the weight of that multiple times at the end of the season. But he is only human, and he genuinely does the best he can, wants the best he can, especially for the people he loves. He wants to lift up the people around him, whether it's his baseball players or whether it's Maddie and her kids. But man, that takes a toll, and he buckles under the weight a little bit. He has every right to feel the weight of that. And then he expresses it poorly, which makes his hero demeanor shatter even further.
I do think, in the future, he would need to sit down and take stock of his need to be a hero and how much of that is self-imposed and how much of it has just been heaped on him. A great kid with a great future becomes a great guy with a great future, but there are pains and losses and anger along the way that people may have hurried him past, certainly his first marriage and those kinds of things. So we hope that people will be shocked and bothered, but also sympathetic.
It's definitely a big climax to end the season on, but at the same time, your heart breaks a little bit, right? It's interesting to see characters who started the season in a not-great place end up in a stronger place, and vice versa.
ANDERSON: Well, and that's by design, as I tell both the writers and the cast. Everybody can't be happy at the same time. Happy people will make for boring TV. I told one of our actors who was like, "You're killing me, you're breaking my heart this season." And I said, "That's a measure of how much I love you and your character, because I want you to have chances to change and grow and as an actor, I know you can go all these places. But as a character, if you have everything you want, what's driving you forward? What's your story? You've got to keep growing and changing." And I think we all, as individuals, have to keep growing and changing all the time Sometimes they're good lessons that are fun to learn, and sometimes there are hard lessons that are (winces) to learn.
But hopefully, we can mix the two and continue to be, as I was saying earlier, better neighbors, better friends, better family members, better peers for it. Because I can't imagine ever wanting to stop growing and learning and deepening my relationships, and I need to stop and remind myself of that when life kicks me in the teeth and I'm like, "Wait. Wasn't there a fun way I could have learned that lesson? Okay, no. But I learned it." Some lessons we have to learn multiple times. Particularly, I think, in romantic relationships, we want everything to be bright and sunny and the birds are singing and the orchestra's playing, but there are dark nights of the soul that come along with that. It's the measure of a relationship, how you get through the dark times and how you appreciate the sunny times.
Seasons 1 and 2 of Sweet Magnolias are currently available to stream on Netflix.