Is ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ Season 2 Based on a Book? Show’s Bosses Explain

The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2 premiered on February 20, but is it based on a book like the first season? Season 1 had Laura Dave’s novel of the same name to use as source material, but her sequel, The First Time I Saw Him, wasn’t released until January 2026, just a month before the Season 2 premiere.

Season 2 is very loosely based on this sequel novel, as the show’s writers had the first 100 pages from Dave when they started working on the script. “What was very exciting and unconventional was that the audience response to Season 1 was so huge that fans clearly wanted a continuation of the story,” executive producer Lauren Neustadter tells TV Insider. “They wanted a Season 2, and the conversation that we had was Laura really wanted to write the novel, and the audience was not going to want to wait that long.”

This resulted in the writers room creating the show “in parallel” with Dave writing the book. “We stayed very close to each other,” Neustadter says. “Josh [Singer, the show’s co-creator and Dave’s husband] and our writers’ room … we sort of went on our own journey, while understanding what the real main touchpoints were for Laura.”

Neustadter points out that the premiere episode and beginning of Dave’s sequel novel are “very, very synced” because the team had the first 100 pages to work with. “After that, we kind of go on interesting parallel paths, but they complement one another, the novel and the show, in a way that’s really singular and really exciting because they were coming to life at the same time,” she adds, crediting Dave for “trusting us” with the process and Singer for “always understanding what the intention was and what Laura was going to be doing in the book.”

Dave and Singer, who have been married since 2012, were very in-sync. “I believe it was in Episode 7, I wrote a line in the book, and [Singer] had written almost the exact same line in the show, having not yet seen that line in the book,” Dave teases. “It was this really lovely thing where these characters have been such a part of all of our lives for so long that they’re like people we were both in the same conversation with.”

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Like The First Time I Saw Him, Season 2 of The Last Thing He Told Me picks up five years after the events of Season 1. In the premiere episode, Hannah (Jennifer Garner) and her stepdaughter Bailey (Angourie Rice) set out for answers after Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), Hannah’s husband and Bailey’s father, unexpectedly shows up following five years on the run. The mother/daughter duo escape unidentified men who are after them, while Owen begins to form a plan to expose the Campano crime family so he can live freely once and for all.

The Last Thing He Told Me, Fridays, Apple TV

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