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Sweet Tooth Showrunner Jim Mickle on Gus's Growth, Personal "Odyssey"

Sweet Tooth Showrunner Jim Mickle spoke with Bleeding Cool about why the third and final season is Gus's richest journey in his "odyssey."

These days, you take with what you can get, and Sweet Tooth showrunner Jim Mickle was able to wrap the journey of Gus (Christian Convery) and company in three seasons for Netflix. Based on the Jeff Lemire DC Comic of the same name, the story follows the human-deer hybrid who sets on his journey to find his mother, Birdie (Amy Seimetz). Along the way, he gains traveling companions in Jeppard (Nonso Anozie), Becky (Stefania LaVie Owen), and Wendy (Naledi Murray), who help him as they also try to uncover the mysterious origins of the deadly Sick traveling through the Alaskan wilderness. Mickle spoke to Bleeding Cool about the challenges the series would have faced if they went beyond the planned three seasons, how filming seasons two and three back-to-back affected planning for season three, and fast-tracking Gus's development as an innocent child into survival mode, and forced to grow up fast in the apocalyptic world.

Sweet Tooth Showrunner Jim Mickle on How Gus Became a Symbol of Hope Amidst Despair

Bleeding Cool: Was 'Sweet Tooth' always planned to be a three-season series? Have you talked to Netflix and Jeff [Lemire] about expanding beyond?

It always felt like three seasons. You don't know when you start the first season; it's a little hard to know what shape things will take, but around season two, we were mapping that out. It became clear this next season is the perfect spot to stick the landing and sync things up with the comic book. Right around then was when Netflix was also thinking about how we were going to pull the show off and as kids are getting older and all that. We had the idea of doing two seasons back-to-back and wrapping this up at the end of season three.

What was the biggest challenge for you this season?

The back-to-back of it was hard. The practical aspect of it was also hard because any television season on its own was difficult. We did the writing for season three while we were shooting season two. It was almost like making one epic season. It's a good question. One of the challenges was that our characters had gone through so much in seasons one and two that it was trying to capture their growth, while at the same time, the story was only a couple of weeks in the life of Gus and Wendy. It was trying to manage that sense of childhood innocence while also dealing with the fact that they've seen some incredibly intense things and gone through things that no normal kid would have to do. Also, getting the tone of that right was always a bit of a trick.

With the darker material from Jeff, what was the process of you parsing through the darker content away to make it more presentable for TV, and was it difficult to process?

It happened organically, I have to say, and it wasn't to change [Sweet Tooth] for television, although I'm sure that helped. Coming out of the comic book when I read it, it was a tough period of my life. Suddenly, the idea of doing a show for multiple seasons that was straight-up melancholy and dark was a lot to go through at that time. I felt like you'd seen so much of that in apocalyptic fiction, especially in the early 2010s I knew was like. I want to see something new in this space. I want to feel something new and when you look at the character of Gus in the comic book, he's almost comedically sort of out of touch with everybody with how naive and innocent he was.

That became the thread, "What if we took that point of view? What if he wasn't the odd man out in the story? What if we took that point of view with this and sent him out into this world?" That was incredibly inspiring to look at an apocalyptic story and go like this. "Let's tell this from this kid's point of view and what does that look like?" Suddenly, it came into its own and then the casting of Christian [as Gus] also took it a step further. There's something so hopeful in him as an actor. As he started shooting, it became clear that's what this story is. We didn't even know that as we were heading in, but I knew I wanted it to feel lush and like a place you would want to visit.

That was always the pitch, but suddenly it was like, "Oh, wow!" Through the eyes of this kid who's filled with an incredible amount of hope. So that was the inspiration for where that stuff went, and then as time went on, it was a challenge to track that with a show that also did have kids, puppets, and family themes. It was always a tricky balance. I'm glad that everybody around us was happy to let it be what it was that there were these incredibly intense, dark, and emotional moments that, to me, always made the sort of the later things pop. They co-exist together in a great way.

Christian's grown in adolescence on the show and how did that help in the development of Gus?

That was one of the challenges because by the time we got to season three…well, when we went to season two, we started writing Gus from season one, and it felt like he's changed so much. He's a different character and by the time we got the sense of who Gus was in season two, and then you jump into season three. It was the same thing where he's changed so much, and he's been through so much. He's experienced things that most adults have experienced. Then it became about like, "Okay, what are we challenging Gus with in season three?" That was the most interesting and rich of the three seasons because you could present him with challenging things and things that were moral gray areas I thought were dramatically interesting. The thesis of season three became: I want Gus to go on this odyssey of seeing all shapes and sizes of humanity and how they deal with what might be the end of human existence and extinction. How do they react, and what does that look like? Coming out of Covid and all that for us was that it felt like a relevant story to tell, and, again, to see that through the eyes of Gus was interesting artistically.

Season three of Sweet Tooth, which also stars Adeel Akhtar, Rosalind Chao, Kelly Marie Tran, Cara Gee, and Ayazhan Dalabayeva, is available on Netflix.

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