July
25
Comic-Con: Lost, Pushing Daisies Creators Find Wealth, Fame in Time Travel, Pie
"We think we are making a character show with a mythology," said "Lost" creator Carlton Cuse. "The characters are the cake and the mythology is the frosting."
[Posted by Erin Maxwell]
"I just wanted to cram a show with as many things as I could that would make me smile, like doggies and pie," said Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller.
Entertainment Weekly’s showrunners panel focused on programs that push the limits of TV viewing, with themes that don’t include a boy-girl romance or a gruff detective with keen insight into the human mind. Instead, we have a pie-loving character with the ability to resurrect the dead, a fembot sent to protect a future leader and a government agent whose prior experience is handling IT at an electronics retailer.
"The best thing to ever be uttered by a network would be, 'We have too many shows about time travel,' Fuller said. “That would be an achievement for everyone in this room."
Showrunners had to deal with writer's strike fallout over the past year, something that was especially difficult for first-year series working to build a fanbase.
“There was a period of time where the network was trying to figure out when to bring us back after the strike, but they didn't want to throw us under the American Idol bus,” said Fuller. “Pushing Daisies is picking up 10 months after the last episode. All of the characters kept the secrets they learned last season and now are ready to bust.”
Josh Schwartz of Chuck says his solution is to pretend they’re starting from scratch. “We are writing the first episode of the new season like a pilot," he said. “We come back with Chuck dangling off a roof and telling us what has happened.”
One of the strike’s key issues was the production of Web content. "It's a reality of the business that people just want more," said Josh Friedman, creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Lost creator Carlton Cuse described online content as an opportunity to expand the fiction. "Our reality games are fun because we get to tell a story we can't tell on the show,” he said. “It's for people committed to the mythology.”
Fuller said, "We were going to do a series of animated shorts on Pigby. But due to the strike, we got a lot of resistance."
Showrunners also said they initially faced the stigma of "genre shows,” since programming with heady sci-fi or fantasy themes had a history of being ignored or rejected by networks and/or audiences.
"We call the mythology the 'rabbit hole.' We can spend six hours talking about time travel and will end up not writing at all," said Friedman. "We went down the rabbit hole in a few episodes and it took us a while to get out."
“There is a fine line between mythology and mechanics. George Lucas drew it when he came up with midi-chlorians,” joked Fuller. "No matter what the genre elements, you will have to want to spend time with those characters for a while."
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