The Comic-Con panel for Resurrection is this afternoon in San Diego, and in anticipation of that, we figured that now was the best possible time to share our interviews with Executive Producers Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters from the recent TV press tour.
Fazekas and Butters have long been favorites around these parts – after all, they gave us Reaper – and this TV season, they’ll be pulling double duty, running both Resurrection and the upcoming Marvel period piece Agent Carter.
But first, Resurrection, which returns Sunday, September 28. The show was possibly a surprise hit for ABC in a year where only three new series ended up being renewed. What’s coming next?
“We have a new returned character who has a huge impact on the Langston family,” Michele Fazekas told us. “She’ll be the antagonist, essentially, for the season. I’m hoping we can announce the casting at Comic-Con. We’re excited about it. It’s a new world now. Whereas the first season was reacting to ‘what is going on now,’ now we’re living with it. What does this mean?” [Note: This may be the role that Michelle Fairley is playing, as announced by Zap2It yesterday. Considering the role is the “formidable mother” of Henry and Fred Langston, it sounds like she’d fit the bill.]
One thing is a guarantee: To keep that personal feeling that Resurrection gives, the action will remain in Arcadia. “For everything that happened at the end of 8, we are in Arcadia, and the stories will always deal with these characters and how the evolution of this phenomena takes place, and what does it mean for these individuals,” Tara Butters promised.
“We definitely have a mythology, and we’re definitely exploring the mythology. I do believe, that part of the arc and the storytelling that we’re trying to do, that the facts of this and what it does to an individual is far more important than why it’s happening. So we’re always trying to explore that and tell stories that you can’t tell on any other show,” Fazekas said about the show’s continuing arc. “We know that everyone’s like ‘what’s happening? Why is it happening?’ And I feel like people ask that question, but it’s like ‘do you really want to know the answer to that?’ We always are answering questions. We always are answering new pieces of the puzzle. In my mind though, a similar question is ‘Why are we here? Why are we alive?’ Can you ever answer that? I don’t know if you can ever answer that. Whatever the answer is will never satisfy everyone, but I feel comfortable in that we know what the answer is, so it’s not like we’re going into it like ‘I don’t know. Let’s just make something up.’ I feel morally okay, because we know what the answer is,” Fazekas teased, saying that she spoke with both Butters and Aaron Zelman, who developed the series, about their own theories.
“I said ‘Aaron, if somebody puts a gun to your sad and says ‘why is it happening? What’s your answer?’ And he answered, and his answer was the same as her answer, which was the same as my answer. I’m not going to tell you what that answer is,” Fazekas said.
Certainly, even with the extraordinary situations, Resurrection will continue to be a show that audiences can identify with. “Everybody has this sense of if you lost somebody, what would it be like to see them again? What would it be like to talk to them? People want to believe that that’s real,” Fazekas told us.
Season 2 of Resurrection premieres September 28, and hopefully there will be more news coming from the Comic-Con panel today!
