Season 2 of Sweet Tooth premiered last week and if you were like us, you couldn’t not watch it all in one sitting. Series showrunner Jim Mickle sat down with ComicBook.com to break down some of the big decisions that went into making the new episodes, telling us about how they adapted the surreal imagery from writer/artist Jeff Lemire and why they chose to kill some characters much earlier in the TV series. You can read our full interview bellow. Spoilers follow!
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ComicBook.com: This season felt a lot like, “Okay, I finished volume one of the book of Sweet Tooth. Let me pick up volume two and start reading.” From your perspective as the showrunner, is it easier or more difficult to feel like the action is exactly where it ended?
Jim Mickle:That’s a good question. It’s good because you get into this thing of how much of a reset do you do? Because you’re literally picking up a scene or two later in some cases, and there’s some things that need to continue on exactly. That’s a really good question. I like it. I watch Succession. It’s always interesting how Succession between episodes are jumping four months at sometimes, right? It’s like, what? And I don’t know how you would do that. I think you’d be constantly sort of worried about the continuity of things. So I likd it in this case because it felt like a really good … I love that touchpoint at the end of season one. Kind of always knew that that’s where season one wanted to end. And then this season really felt like we could sort of dig right into the promise of the season right away and not have to do a whole new setup.
CB: Now on that note, you’ve got way more hybrid kids in this season than you did in the last one, some of them very much more elaborate than they were in the previous. So, where do you find the balance in more kid, more animal-like?
JM: Because we knew that the end of the spectrum was like you have Gus on one end of the spectrum, then you get Bobby on the other end of the spectrum, which is full puppet and very much … He is like 95%, 99% animal. And so then the goal is everywhere in between. We wanted to show that it really isn’t … Gus is sort of an outlier, that he is so human in a way. So season two, we brought in a whole new hybrid department. A designer named Jane O’Kane came in and headed up this amazing department, and we just really made that promise of we’re going to stay as in-camera as possible, and what are the things that we can achieve that we think we can achieve in an episodic series in terms of puppetry and prosthetics? And a lot of those kids have really incredibly limited hours. And so it was the biggest challenge of the season, and at times it nearly broke us, but I’m glad we committed to it because they’re great.
CB: Now, in the time since season one and now, there have been even more high profile post-apocalyptic shows, The Last of Us, Station Eleven.
How do you make sure that you stay true to what you’re doing and also that subgenre, but also make yourself stand apart from what they’re doing? Is it just entirely in the tone of Sweet Tooth?
JM: I think it is, yeah, because I think the pilot, we really found a tone of what the show was going to be, that some of that was by design. Some of that is just organic. And it just happens. And it happens when you have Christian, and it happens when you cast Will Forte and happens when you shoot in New Zealand, but you just find this sort of different flavor, which is great. And so I think that grew during season one.
And then the beauty of season two is you come in and everybody knows what it is because you’re constantly finding it in season one. Season two, you can come in and sort of go, “We all know what Sweet Tooth is.” And so there’s definitely times where you start to tell the story and you start to go down these roads and you start to go, “I feel like I could see this in any apocalyptic show or movie.” And so a lot of times, you come back and we would just say, “What’s the Sweet Tooth version of this?”And in season two, everyone kind of understands what that is. And even if you can’t entirely define it, you sort of know when it is and when it isn’t. So that’s a big part of it. And then I think a lot of that is just being able to stay in our lane and do what our show does and not try to feel like we’re trying to chase other apocalyptic things.
CB: I want to kind of start to dig into the spoilers of the show, and we’ll run this stuff a little later. But in episode two, you have the sequence between Dr. Singh and Gus. That’s sort of the hallucination scene.
And it’s really digging into that surreal artwork that Jeff is known for in a way that the show hasn’t done. You even literally do the cover of him picking the roof up off of the house. So, what are the conversations like in terms of, “All right, we want to do surreal imagery. How do we make that work in our show?
JM: Yeah, really, really, really good question. And I’m glad you brought that up. Because that was something that right from the beginning, that was an issue that I really remembered and really, I think it was maybe two or three issues. And I really wanted to repeat that in the show. And I think that was one of the things, the beginning of the season where this is something that has to be in the season. And then we kind of knew, all right, season two, or episode two, that’s the one.
A lot of that I have to get huge credit to Toa Fraser, who was our producing director. So he directed episode two. And that was the mandate to him really was like, ‘All right, we’re pulling this off. We haven’t really done this. We’ve had sort of magic realism elements of the show before, but how do we pull this off and how do we do this in our sort of in-camera world?’
Cont’d
JM: And he just did wonderful work with those backgrounds. And I love that in-camera thing where the background dissolves behind him and the flowers pulled away. And we kept talking about that. We were like, “This feels like … ” In a lot of shows, this would just turn into sort of 3D CGI central. And it was really challenging him to again, keep it as in-camera as it possibly could be, and using really theatrical elements. And he’s done a lot of stage work, and he comes from theater originally. And so I think he really loved that challenge of keeping it inside this box, so to speak. So that was a big part of that. But yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I’m really proud of how that stuff came in.
CB: It looks amazing. And flipping back through the books after re-watching the season and being like, “Oh my gosh.” There’s some stuff that you just pull right out of the books.
JM: Yeah
CB: In season two, you introduced quite a few totally original characters to the narrative. And I’m curious with something that has a pretty dense source material that it does.
What are the qualities that you look for in an original character to make sure that they fit in that world?
JM: “One thing, and this is one of our writers, Dan Stewart, I remember kind of coined at some point, that it was something about very ordinary people that are sort of stuck in these extraordinary positions. I think that was even a line that was in an episode that we cut at some point. But that was a thing. I remember we started talking about a character at some point, and there was just something about it, and I can’t even remember what it was. It was a sheriff or something. And it was just some aspect of it that just didn’t quite ring true. And we kept going, ‘Why not?’ And that was the thing really, was it just didn’t feel like a normal, ordinary human being that was sort of thrust into this thing. So I think that’s kind of the defining factor.”
CB: When this season starts, most of your characters are split up. They’re all in different places. And by virtue of that, we’re spending more time with sort of individual characters in their respective places, wherever they are in the world.
How do you find the balance in deciding how long you’re going to be with this scene, and then how long you’re going to keep them apart in order to get that resolution of everyone coming back together?
JM: I think that was a big decision of how do you do that? And when do you do that? Because there’s a point where it falls apart and there’s a point where it feels too early. I think our instinct was to try to pull it off a little bit before when you think it will happen, because there’s always that thing where you’re just constantly, especially an episodic where you’re just … You can sense it when you watch something. You’re like, “All right, you’re teasing this out because you decided that something’s not going to happen until three more episodes.” So you’re sort of spinning your wheels. So we didn’t want to do that.
So I think we sort of knew that we wanted it to happen sometime before the audience fully expects it to happen. And then it kind of all happens organically, really, from there. Things start to branch off in a way that suddenly you start to set wheels in motion and you’re like, “Ooh, this is actually going to go way longer.” And so you have to pull some things back. So it’s interesting. I mean, I feel like once you start to tell the episode’s story, know what it is, it constantly changes. I was telling someone earlier that I remember thinking that Birdie’s character was going to be a massive character in every episode, and that was a big part of it. And we kept trying to fit her into episode two, and you’re just like, suddenly it’s like, “It actually doesn’t work here.” And you start putting it in episode three, and it’s like, “Nope.” And I remember telling people, “It’s definitely going to be five that she comes.” And then you’re like, “Nope.”
And suddenly it isn’t until seven that you’re just like, “You know what? It’s just going to be one episode that’s just her.” And I think that’s the beauty of the storytelling is that things evolve and you learn from the story itself of where those things want to go. So I don’t know that we ever set out specifically to say, this character will have this much of the driving story. But it’s interesting when I look back and go like, “Oh, actually so-and-so is actually not even in this episode.” But it just didn’t feel like it was warranted.
CB: Well, and by the end of the season, you’ve taken some of the characters off the board that in Jeff’s comics, make it all the way to Alaska. And obviously within adaptation, changes are going to happen.
But what’s the process in deciding whose character’s journey will end now as opposed to, it ends later based on your source material?
JM: Yeah, really good question. So for some of those characters, we told so much more of their story in the first two seasons than does happen in the comic book. And so at some point, I felt like what the theme was for this season and how those characters aligned with that theme and their story really fell into that. It really felt like this is perfect. This is their story. And I really feel like their story and how they contribute to that, I feel like that story is done. And I never want to be that show that keeps characters on for another season just so they can be there and bounce other characters off of them. And I think that we have a history of whether it’s Will Forte in the pilot, it’s like there’s characters that pass on, and it’s a big part of our show is loss. And dealing with the loss and dealing with the ripple effects of that and the stories that they leave behind is a big aspect of the comic book.
So I don’t think we ever sort of went like, “Oh, this is going to be right from the beginning, oh, this is going to be the season where we lose X character.” But I think, again, it all happened in a very organic way that just felt like, “You know what? I think this is this character. I think this is their story.” And then it’s a difficult thing when you talk to those actors and all that, because they become a part of your family.
CB: Well, if I can close out with this one. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but it kind of seems like you’re headed for a third season that could maybe complete your story.
JM: Let’s hope.
CB: Did the ending that Jeff has in the books, is that sort of your guiding star for a conclusion? Or is Sweet Tooth: The Return something that you really would be interested in too?
JM: I mean, both really, I mean, because I love both of those, but I think, I love the Arctic story. That was a big part. And in the comic book, I love that. And John Carpenter’s The Thing is my favorite movie, and I love stories that take place there. So I would absolutely, absolutely love to do that. And I love when the comic opens and suddenly you’re on the ship with those guys and Thacker and all that. So I love that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I love where the comic book goes, and I think the beauty is that, again, it’s like we can kind of use the backbones of those things and we can use the big story points for those things. And obviously there’s some mythology that we’ve created in history and all that we’ve created that does jive with that. And that’s kind of the beauty of mixing all that stuff together. So yeah, let’s hope that season two does well.
