The Philadelphia Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit is back on the case this week as Fox‘s Alert: Missing Persons Unit returns for Season 2.
It’s been about a year since the Season 1 finale, and star Dania Ramirez teased quite a bit to Deadline about the upcoming installment, revealing that the second season will be “a lot lighter” now that the drama with Nikki (Ramirez) and Jason (Scott Caan) have some answers about their son Keith.
“What’s great about this season is that we really got a lot of answers at the end of last season to wrap up that whole drama for Jason and for Nikki,” Ramirez said. “They get to put that behind them now. So now it’s really getting to the cases of the week, and that’s the drama of the show.”
According to Ramirez, her character will be dealing with “a lot more layers on an everyday basis,” which might involve her working on her impulse control a bit (no more running out of the station at a moment’s notice!) to let Jason and Mike (Ryan Broussard) take the lead in the field.
She described Mike and Jason’s dynamic as “a buddy cop situation” that lends itself to “a lot of comedic moments.”
Season 1 ended on quite a somber note, after Nikki and Jason realized the boy who had been living with them was not actually their son Keith. Instead, he was a stranger whose mom had forced him to pretend to be Keith for ransom money. When she comes back to get him, Nikki and Jason try to save him from his abusive situation, but his mother kills him during a standoff.
Ramirez admits “it was very emotional,” but explains that things will pick up about six months after the events of Season 1. Since Nikki and Jason have both had time to process their trauma and come to terms with Keith’s disappearance, they will be moving into a new stage of their post-divorce relationship.
“There’s a lot of love there and commitment, because they’re family, but they’re not together. So now they get to explore their romantic relationships outside of each other,” Ramirez said. “And yes, they’ll get affected. It gives you a little bit of more of a dimension of what to play with. They really, genuinely love each other.”
Particularly, Ramirez teases that the tables have turned from Season 1 and Nikki will now have to deal with her emotions when Jason begins dating someone new. Though she’s happy with Mike, Nikki will have some complicated feelings that she doesn’t expect as she watches Jason move on.
Don’t expect Nikki to get everything right, either. One of Ramirez’s favorite parts of playing this character is that she’s flawed.
“She is not perfect. She doesn’t know how to be the boss all the time…being a parent doesn’t come with it with the instruction manual. She struggles with her her daughter sometimes in that relationship,” Ramirez explained. “She also feels really human. I love that about her the most, and I think because she’s flawed, she’s able to have so much empathy and compassion for those individual cases. She’s easy to talk to, because she doesn’t feel like someone that’s just going out there as a cop to get the job done. She really, genuinely cares.”
Alert: Missing Persons Unit is returning to Fox during Women’s History Month, which is fitting for a show with a strong yet complicated woman with powerful convictions leading the charge. Ramirez reflected on her own womanhood in a video spotlight for Fox, which is embedded at the bottom of this story.
Speaking with Deadline, she explained that being a woman has helped her “find the power within me within this career.” As she’s developed her craft and also nurtured her life outside of acting, she’s realized she doesn’t think “there’s one way to define a woman.”
“We are all humans. And this is just the skin that I’m in, and I’m proud of it, and I love it,” she continued.
As for Tuesday’s premiere, the episode will follow the MPU as they search for an entire bus full of children, Ramirez explained, adding: “There’s a lot more intensity, and there’s a lot more stakes because now we have to also deal with a lot more parents. So I feel like it adds it adds a little more of an edge to the show.”
Audiences can expect an expanded reach this season, as the MPU will also venture to Amish country for an episode and find themselves wrapped up in the music industry in another episode.
“We also get to dive into Philadelphia, and we get to feel the city a little more and feel the people within that city,” Ramirez teased.
Alert: Missing Persons Unit Season 2 debuts March 5 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.
