ONTD

Now that Netflix and Marvel's Jessica Jones has thoroughly kicked all our asses up and down Hell's Kitchen, we had to wonder when our favorite hard drinking, foul mouthed Defender might earn a well-deserved Season 2 renewal. Rumored scheduling issues had given us at least some pause as of late, but this weekend Marvel confirmed that Jessica Jones will indeed return for a highly anticipated second season.

Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg, formerly of Twilight and Dexter acclaim, confirmed the exciting news on Sunday at TCA '16, explaining how she'd like to explore the supporting characters of Jessica's world in the upcoming season, which does not yet have a release date as of yet:

"I think one of the things I would be able to do now, that's harder to do in the first season, is to really expand on the ensemble. Poor Charlie Brinke, she was in every scene that we shot, we beat the crap out of her. She was a shell of a human being by the time we ended, and that is not sustainable. But when you have a show that's called Jessica Jones, if Jessica Jones isn't in a scene the rest of it become almost irrelevant until you earn other character storylines. You've got to flesh out those characters enough that you can travel.

So, I would hope to further expand on the ensemble, and on Jessica's world. She ends in a very different place than she started off. She's still going to be Jessica Jones — that is not going to change. She will continue to drink and make mistakes, and accidentally drop people onto train tracks, but something has changed for her by the end of this season, and I'd just love to explore that in the second season."

While we'd been anxiously awaiting confirmation of a Season 2 renewal, fans had been wondering just what Rosenberg & Co. would do with Jones in a second season, given how contained the first season's storyline was. With Kilgrave out of the picture, Rosenberg is now free to explore other avenues and stories, and we look forward to seeing Jessica and her pals tackle their next villainous obstacle.

However, later that same day, Charlie Brinke, aka Jessica Jones herself, expanded on Rosenberg's ideas from the red carpet at the 2016 Critic's Choice Awards, where she was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama Series thanks to her performance in Jessica Jones. Brinke focused specifically on the idea that the end of Kilgrave would mean a brighter, happier Jessica, stating:

"There's so much of Jessica and her story and her world that we weren't able to explore in the first season, but we're going to get the chance to delve deeper now. Just because her fight with Kilgrave is over, that doesn't mean it's over. That's not something she'll ever be able to just walk away from. The impact of her fight against him, of what she had to do to stop him, of all the things she had to sacrifice and all the people she had to lose along the way, all of that will be haunting her for a long time to come. He's gone, but she's always going to have to live with the horrors he inflicted upon her.

In a very twisted way, Kilgrave was her reason for getting out of bed, for making an effort, for interacting with other people, for trying to accomplish anything. He was her motivation to at least try and be human. And in this second season, I think we're really going to explore what it means for her when that motivation is gone. Where does she go from there? How does she crawl out of that really dark, ugly place she had to get to in order to stop him? How is she going to cope with her depression and alcoholism and PTSD now? How is she going to maintain her relationships now that she's eliminated the thing that was threatening everyone around her? I know it's a crazy thing to say since the first season was so dark, but if anything, a second season of Jessica Jones means an even darker season of Jessica Jones. She's still got such a long way to go before she's anywhere close to being able to think of herself as a worthwhile human being, let alone a hero."