SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers from the first episode of IT: Welcome To Derry. If you have not yet watched the show, you check it out with a HBO Max subscription.
We’re only one episode into the run of IT: Welcome To Derry, but there are already all varieties of Stephen King references and easter eggs for fans to chew on – but obviously, the most prominent are those that tie the series to the movies IT: Chapter One and IT: Chapter Two. The show is a canon prequel, and that means that there are going to be numerous threads that tie characters and events together. For those telling the story, that’s immensely tricky, but the showrunners had a great fictional mentor to follow: Mike Hanlon.
IT: Welcome To Derry’s Showrunners Saw Themselves In The Lead Researcher Of The Losers Club
Hanlon, of course, is one of the members of the Losers Club in IT, and he is the self-designated prime historian of Derry, Maine – using his job as a head librarian to perform deep-dive research into his town’s dark past. When I spoke with IT: Welcome To Derry’s showrunners earlier this month and asked about managing the timeline and connection, Jason Fuchs explained how they took inspiration from the wonderful Stephen King character. He explained,
I think the areas of the book we were most intrigued by were the ones that begged the greatest number of questions. Wherever the mystery was is where we sort of targeted. We feel like we kind of got to play Mike Hanlon, Detective a little bit in the same way that Mike in the books is sitting there in his library attic researching the history of Derry, looking for those breadcrumbs, those little clues to what happened in ITs past. That was kind of us. The obvious place to start, of course, was the interludes that Mike Hanlon writes within the novel.
The tragic story of The Black Spot is included in one of the book’s interludes, and it also expands on the history of the Hanlon family in Derry, as Mike learns about the horrible fire from his own father – who was there to witness it. In the show, things are changed around and it’s Leroy Hanlon, Mike’s grandfather, who will be involved when the show eventually gets to the blaze… but viewers will also soon be meeting Leroy’s wife Charlotte and his son Will.
But what about other familiar names and families? The pilot features a character named Teddy Uris, who is clearly related to Losers Club member Stanley Uris, but there is plenty where that came from, according to Brad Caleb Kane:
‘Hanlon’ is not the only name that fans will recognize, to your question. Some other names, familiar Loser names might come up later on in the season. I don't want to give anything away. I don't wanna give any spoilers right now. But some familiar characters in this might actually be parents of some of the people we come to know.
(I’ll note that I’ve seen five of the episodes in the show’s first season, but Jason Fuchs suggested that there is something particularly special in this area coming in the final three.)
Get Ready To Enter The Macroverse
When I asked the same question to Andy and Barbara Muschietti – who co-created IT: Welcome To Derry with Jason Fuchs – they took a step beyond the comments by Fuchs and Kane by acknowledging an even bigger big picture plan. Mike Hanlon’s interludes in IT provides the framework for anthology-esque stories that play out across three seasons, but the show has aspirations to go beyond not just Derry, not just Maine, but the boundaries of reality.
The fire at The Black Spot, the massacre of the Bradley Gang, and the explosion at the Kitchner Ironworks are respectively the three basic plots that will play out across three seasons (all from Stephen King’s book), but the ultimate goal is to dig into that mysterious shapeshifting monster known as IT. Andy Muscheitti told me,
It was more about illustrating the existing events of the book. It was more about bringing all the answers to the questions that are presented in the book. One of the great things about the book is it's so cryptic – especially all the stories that stem from the interludes; these are like pieces of a puzzle. And for me, you know, the challenge was to complete this puzzle and make a compelling story that has a clear direction. And that direction is explaining the origins of IT, how IT became Pennywise.
It’s established in Stephen King’s novel that IT is a fear-feasting entity who originates from a reality known as the Macroverse, and while the IT movies have lightly grazed that side of everything, the show will be going right at it. Muschietti continued,
IT is a book that talks about the other dimension, the Macroverse, but only from the perspective of humans. So we don't really fully understand what's on the other side. So we are aiming for a bigger reveal of a larger story, a larger mythology, and a larger understanding of what IT is and what IT wants.
That larger mythology, however, can’t be fully explored without going beyond just what’s featured between the covers of IT. Constant Readers of Stephen King know that the author has constructed an elegant web within his bibliography that sees titles connected to one another either directly or lightly. Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane told me that fans can expect the show to feature nods to books like Firestarter and The Dark Tower, and Barbara Muschietti echoed that idea, saying,
Like you, we are huge fans of Stephen King, and we've been since our early teens, and he does that a lot. He connects all of his universes. So it's such a joy for us to find tissue to connect.
Needless to say, there is a whole lot of exciting stuff on the way for Stephen King fans in IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1. If you dug what you saw in the premiere, you should know that the second episode is set to debut early, as it’s going to debut for HBO Max subscribers on Friday in celebration of Halloween.
