Sci-Fi Bulletin’s relationship with Rockne S. O’Bannon goes back twenty years, to the time when SFB’s Paul Simpson wrote the official books on O’Bannon’s SF creation Farscape. In the week before Thanksgiving, they caught up on the phone to discuss O’Bannon’s latest project, on which he is executive producer – CBS’ Evil, created by Robert and Michelle King. In the first part of this interview, O’Bannon looks at the roots of the show and previews tonight’s Christmas episode…

 

How did you get involved with Evil ?

I don’t often staff on things but I always enjoyed the experience – I worked with Eric Kripke on Revolution and David Goyer on Constantine. I’m a huge of Robert and Michelle King and last year when I got my hands on the pilot script, I read it just because I was a fan of theirs. It was a genre show so I reached out to my agents, who happened to be their agents also, and said I’d love to talk to them if they think I can be of help to them because I’m more of a genre guy. They read a spec pilot of mine that’s not about evil but looking at some of the same things that Evil is intended to examine – how we become this world of “us and them,” you can’t just disagree with something any more.

I met with them and we hit it off. There’s a really good rapport there. Everything dovetailed nicely for everybody.

Had they started work on episode 2 when you joined?

When you sell a series, and make the pilot and the network’s interested, you go in and tell them where you think it’s headed before they pick it up. Robert and Michelle developed a lot of the themes and some journeys for some of the characters, so they had a 7-9 page document that they were able to give to all us writers a week or so before we convened. We had that in hand, and it was fabulous to have that as a template. There’s a lot of stuff in there that’s included in the show – or variations – and other things that we’ve moved off quite a bit.

Episode 3 [3 Stars], the one I wrote, was definitely in the document: a boss abusing his power, that’s obviously in today’s news, way too common. That was a natural for us to dive into right away. It’s an example of evil that’s always been extant but very much the focus right now.

John Glover did a brilliant job on that as the boss.

He’s great. Robert and Michelle were LA folk but they moved their production base to New York, and one of the considerations was they had access to an incredible talent pool of stage actors. Our DA is in Moulin Rouge right now on Broadway!

The casting is excellent – Katja [Herbers] and Mike [Colter] have something there that the screen sees… even if the characters don’t yet. The four children who play Kristen’s daughters – to find one that can play that well, but four is amazing.

And again, they’re all from the stage – they have Broadway stage experience. To be able to perform on stage nightly give you a lot of practice and professionalism. Robert established this great dynamic for them when he directed the pilot – they talk over each other, and it’s funny. Many of the lines are scripted, but some are extemporised by them on set. When they all talk together, it’s great.

When I watched the pilot, I thought this had the potential to really fly.

It’s on CBS who have recently changed management, and I think the new folks are very interested in exploring new areas that maybe CBS in the past hasn’t looked into. Robert and Michelle are the perfect people to do that – they have the sensibility and interest in examining this notion of evil, taking a deep dive into the nature of evil. As medical science expands we’re better able to understand the human mind, and psychological explanations for evil acts are a little bit more available to us on that side. But the question is, is it only a physical process, is it our brain tissue that allows us to do this, or is the origin of evil more profound than that? To me it’s a fascinating thing to examine.

The show isn’t a polemic, but there are obviously points of view and discussions among the characters that to me elevates it above any sort of genre procedural. There’s other stuff going on.

The origins of the show, as Robert and Michelle have mentioned, is their own personal discussions on the nature of evil, why it can exist, why it seems as profound now as ever. They created these three great characters to present all the facets of that.

Look at David, Mike Colter’s character. He’s looking for a level of certainty in an institution that’s historically grounded in absolutism, the Catholic Church, but then again he’s going to give his life over to it – can it stand up to rigorous challenge? It should if he’s going to do that.

Then there’s Ben, who’s this absolutist in the other direction, very much an empiricist, but in his work his beliefs are being challenged. And then there’s Kristen, who’s the character when I first read the pilot script that I immediately identified with because the show at its core is her journey. David is trying to stay very true to a very stringent point of view – he’s challenging it but has a strong point of view on a spiritual side; Ben is very much strong on the other side, and both are being challenged.

Kristen is in the middle when we first meet her. She couldn’t be more identifiable: her focus is her family, she’s got work, she’s got bills to pay, she’s in the court system that’s meant to be a black and white world, and she doesn’t have time for a spiritual deeper dive into things that are outside making her daily life work. The genius of the premise is she takes on this job – and it is a job: as we show in episode 2, she’s prepared to play one job against the other and go back to the DA’s office depending who gives her the better deal. It’s very practical what she’s doing, but the new job is putting in front of her all these new questions that are putting her in a place where she can start to examine those deeper questions within herself. And then there are things happening, certainly with her mother, where evil is impacting her own family. To me it’s begun a really fascinating journey for her that’s going to be fascinating over many seasons discovering what may in fact exist outside our conventional psychological and medical knowledge.

There are still a number of loose ends from episodes – what was the angel in the hospital; how did Ben’s device have the voice at home? The show did wander a little towards what felt like Supernatural (as in the TV show) territory for a time but then it got back on track – the encounter with the ghost was quite chilling.

We want to involve the audience viscerally. The very fact that you can’t explain Ben’s device, it may never be explained (possibly), or David seeing the ghost at his father’s compound – you’re feeling the same things the characters are. The show is not saying that ghosts don’t have real world explanations – David has drunk the spiked punch. There is an explanation, but you the audience are seeing the same thing he’s seeing, and there’s a visceral connection with the characters which to me is part of the strength of the show.

In the writers’ room we keep a list of our hanging chads that haven’t been explained yet. It’s great to have it there because sometimes breaking a story we can say, “Wait – this could be a great moment to introduce this notion and either heighten it or explain it.” But maybe there are things we don’t ever explain – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have explanations.

To an extent they remind me of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels, where these things happen but there is a real world explanation if you want to see it that way.

That’s kind of the heart of the show. Even if there are things that are overtly supernatural I like to think we have created enough of a template for the show that it is implicit that the show may not be proffering a prosaic common world explanation but there may in fact be one. I hope that’s baked into it.

I do like the hierarchy of demons mythology being built alongside Leland being pure human evil with Sebastian… I’m hoping this isn’t going to end up with him going in somewhere with a gun. [Editor’s note – episode 9, aired the week after this interview, reveals the truth]

Believe me, no one is more sensitive to that than Robert and Michelle King. That’s so much on our radar. That’s a huge factor for them, making sure it isn’t that. I hope you will be satisfied [with the Sebastian plotline]. There’s some really interesting stuff coming up for Leland in the last episodes. I just saw the network cut for our Christmas episode [airing 12 December] which I wrote and it is a Christmas episode factored through Evil.

It’s a Not-So-Wonderful Life!

I don’t want to give too much away but it’s a play on Christmas songs and all the conventional stuff we’ve all grown up with. We watched The Charlie Brown Christmas and Frosty the Snowman, and they’re perennials – we show them to our kids. It’s what Robert and Michelle do so well – taking the world and turning it a certain way and making you giggle. There’s a lot of heart in the episode and a play on the stickiness of certain Christmas songs, the way they get stuck in your head.

To me it’s so pleasing to be able to do a variation on all the conventional tropes that we’re so familiar with.

 

Part 2 of this interview looks ahead to the future of the show and the effect of the early renewal on the storytelling process.

 

Thanks to Elizabeth Rolnik for her help in arranging this interview.