Posted in: SYFY, TV | Tagged: revival

Revival Showrunners on Key Series Themes, Big Season Moments & More

With Season 1 now wrapped, Revival Showrunners Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce discussed the show's key themes, favorite moments, and more.

With season one of the SYFY supernatural series Revival in the books, creators Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce tapped into several tropes to capture the essence of the popular Tim Seeley and Mike Norton Image comic. The series follows the rural town of Wausau, Wisconsin, as Deputy Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano) attempts to investigate a supernatural phenomenon where the dead get resurrected and mysteriously gain healing powers, among them is her sister Martha "Em" Cypress (Romy Weltman), a social outcast, as the two try to keep Em's secret from their father, Wayne Cypress (David James Elliot), the town sheriff. As the mystery unravels, fears drive religious fanaticism from locals, and government intervention seeks to segregate and experiment on the "Revivers" as Dana and Em try to get to the truth while facing the unrest. Boyce and Koontz spoke to Bleeding Cool about how the series's familiar themes become more chilling during uncertain political times and broke down their most memorable episodes of the season, which also happen to drop major exposition for the series.

Revival Creators Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce on Empathy Themes, Favorite Episodes

As the season played out, there were going to be the obvious political comparisons. I was wondering how you felt it played out between humanity and the Revivified, and were there certain subtexts you wanted to avoid?

Koontz: I don't know that we wanted to avoid. We wanted to present this in a manner that forces you to examine what's going on in the world without being preachy about it. Like in the slippery slope of making the decisions, and as Luke always says, beautifully, "Othering," and what that means. It wasn't meant to say, "'Reviver' equals 'immigrant,' and this is what it means." It's also the family member who learns that their daughter is gay, doesn't know how to deal with that, and shuns them from their family, and then, only to bring them back in.

There are all these examples of this in the world, and we wanted to present it as, "Hey, this is what's happening. This is what's out there. How do you feel empathy for these people at this moment? If you do, then maybe you can reflect on what's going on in the world, and maybe there's empathy for you to find there as well." We hope that there is, because it's unbelievably prevalent, and it became more so even as we were making the show. We wrote this well before some of the recent events, but we hope people reflect on it and think about that for sure.

Boyce: Yeah, it's in the comic, right? It starts there, and one of the things that Aaron and I loved about the comic was that storyline. It comes from the same world as 'The Twilight Zone,' [George] Romero, all these stories, and genres that speak about our times and our experiences. This is one of the universal truths: we tend to other people. We are tribal; we create our small groups, then we "other" people, and that story continues to be more relevant than ever. It continues to force people like us to have to put a mirror up to society, but tell it entertainingly, that's accessible, relatable, anybody can come to, and that we can…it's not preachy. This is human nature, and we want to explore what that means, all facets and nuances of it.

What was the most challenging sequence to pull off this season? Do you have a personal favorite?

Boyce: I will say the finale was rough [laughs], this entire thing, right down to getting to the end. That was…generally what should have been maybe three days we shot in a single day. It presented itself with issues that we had to problem-solve. That being said, I thought it turned out wonderfully. It forced us to be more efficient and economical about that sequence. That's one example of the whole show, where our budgetary and scheduling limitations caused us to become more economical about our creative decisions. We believe that those limitations usually breed great creative solutions.

Koontz: My quick answer to this is episode six ("Bloodlines"). Episode six was extremely daunting; it was the one that everybody tried to cut repeatedly, and we fought hard to keep. It was our "second pilot," as we called it, recontextualizing what's happening, raising the stakes to a different level. It's an episode that Luke and I wrote, and from the get-go, when we first put our board up of what the season was going to be, we knew that was going to be a big episode. That was one.

Episode eight ("A Rose and a Thorn") was another very daunting episode in that it was something that we had to rewrite several times, because we were telling so much of a story without our main characters, so we changed that. To do a whole flashback episode, in a sci-fi series, is not a 90 percent flashback is not a normal thing, so getting everybody on board to understand what the vision of this was and the information that's being dispelled and what's there was an uphill battle, but very proud.

Oddly enough, those are my two favorite episodes of the season, so it worked out, and we stuck to our guns and what there, and then I would also say the pilot ("Don't Tell Dad") and the barn sequence that we had to get right. It had to be the comic; it was so iconic, and what was done there, and to let people know, like, "Hey, this comic is here. We're going to play with it." Because the first issue of the comic is very similar to the pilot, but from there, we start to go into some of their stories, diverge, and go on our path in a way. We also wanted to ground you and the comic readers in a familiar world, and that had to feel like those beautiful panels that Mike and Tim had created.

Season one of Revival, which also stars Andy McQueen, Hudson Wurster, Steven Ogg, Lenore Zann, Gianpaolo Venuta, Katharine King So, CM Punk, and Konima Parkinson-Jones, is available to stream on Peacock.

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