What’s your history with Comic-Con?
I’ve been coming to Comic-Con for a long time, really since the beginning of Lost. The first time was in 2004. Comic-Con has become very corporatized and a mature media and publicity event. At the beginning, well before I was attending, it was just guys talking about comics and buying and selling them. Then it began to celebrate genre storytelling in other forms, mainly movies, and now predominantly it’s focused on television. That may have something to do with the fact that there are 420 scripted television shows between network, cable and streaming and then surrounding all that is just a ton of publicity and reporters and all the people that cover media.
At the very beginning when I was doing Lost, we would have a panel and I would have a lot of time to walk around and hang out with people. Now it’s a much more rigorously scheduled media event where creators are moving from venue to venue doing content pieces for various magazines, online sites, networks, so as it’s matured it’s lost a little bit of its independent feeling. The adventure of discovery has been challenged by the fact that it’s so packed – it’s hard to get into rooms and venues for all the best panels. You have to sleep overnight! I think there’s good in that it’s kind of a fantastic celebration of popular culture and in particular of shows that aren’t award-type shows, that are really meaningful to a segment of the audience. On the other hand it’s gotten a bit too over-subscribed in lots of different ways.
Has the fun gone out of it a bit?
Yeah.
So you’re promoting The Strain and Colony – what can we expect at your panels?
And Bates Motel! I’m doing three. Bates Motel is going into its final year, so this is our last chance to celebrate with the audience for that show. We’re going to show a new scene and talk about some of our plans for the final season of the show which I think will be really exciting.
On The Strain we have shot the entire third season of the show but it won’t start airing until 28 August. This season’s by far my favorite. We did 10 episodes instead of 13, there’s an incredible amount of narrative velocity, it’s also about all out war between the humans and the [vampires] and it’s a really kick-ass 10 hours of television. I don’t want to paint a completely dark picture of Comic-Con – fundamentally at its core, the thing that is most energising is that you have people who who love genre shows and they get to see the stars and the creators of their shows up close. The Strain is a huge Comic-Con favourite and it’s really fun to get a chance to interact with the fans there.
I’m really excited to see what the crowd’s reaction was to the first season of Colony. We’re in the middle of shooting the second episode of the new season and we’ll be showing some unseen footage – it’s really fun now when you can have a dialogue with the audience when they’ve seen, in this case, 10 episodes of the show. They’re just starting to get engaged, we’re going to have the whole cast down there and it’s going to be great.
What’s the best cosplay costume you’ve seen at Comic-Con?
Oh my gosh. I think that the costuming at Comic-Con is such a high bar – people put incredible amounts of time into thinking about what they’re going to do. I appreciate when people do things collectively, so maybe it was seeing nearly an entire division of stormtroopers all marching in unison looking like they were directly out of the hallway of a ship on Star Wars.
One year I walked around in a stormtrooper uniform. My partner on Lost, Damon Lindelof and I basically attended a Lost reunion panel in disguise – he was Boba Fett and I was disguised as a stormtrooper. No-one paid any attention to us – it’s amazing that you can walk around Comic-Con in a stormtrooper’s uniform. You can ask people “Is this seat taken?” and they look annoyed that you want to sit next to them, disregarding the fact that you’re actually in a stormtroopers uniform. Then we got up in the middle of the panel – I think people just thought we were crazy Lost fans – and then we took our costumes off and revealed who we were. Stormtrooper costumes are really designed for show and not go, so I had to lie on the floor to get my costume off and reveal my identity. But it was a small price to pay for participating in the craziness that is Comic-Con.
In an age where there’s so much great TV being made, what do you do to make your shows cut through?
It’s very hard. Sometimes it might take years for a show to cut through. Breaking Bad was a low-rated show until nearly the very end and then it had this massive spike and an incredible amount of people got caught up in watching it. You never know when your show’s going to catch fire. There’s a lot of really good shows – it’s unrealistic to expect to try to be everybody’s favourite show.
Do you hang out with your peers when you’re not speaking at Comic-Con?
It’s a great chance to get together with my fellow showrunners, people I’ve worked with on other projects whether it’s actors or writers – everybody’s down there and so that part is really fun. The making of a TV show is not glamorous, it is really hard work. The average showrunner works monastically, 60 to 80 hours a week on a really tight time clock in order to make an episode, so Comic-Con is nice in that it’s fun to see everybody outside the context of work and there’s always some wonderful, surprising encounters with people that you don’t expect to see. I always love crossing paths with Bruce Campbell, who starred in the very first show I created called The Adventures of Brisco County Jr and he’s just a megastar at Comic-Con which is usually enhanced by the fact that he’s wearing a bright red suit. He’s probably down there because they’re doing a new Ash vs Evil Dead TV series so Bruce will be around. I see people from across my career and that part’s really nice.
Do you get nervous before you show something to the Comic-Con audience?
For Lost we’d be in Hall H where there’s 6,500 people there so it creates a bit of nerves, but you realise is that the people who are there – they love you and the show so you’re in the warm embrace of people who care about your work. In television you make it and it goes out into this void and you get some response on social media, but there’s this wonderful communion where you get to that place where you get to see how your work’s being received by others and that’s really satisfying, the culmination of the storytelling experience.
