Season 3 of MTV’s Teen Wolf will bring some new changes to the show’s world — a new filming location, and an expanded episode order that contains twice as many episodes as the show usually gives us. At the center of these changes is the show’s talented showrunner and Executive Producer Jeff Davis, also known to many as the man who brought this incarnation of Teen Wolf to life.
We were able to speak with Mr. Davis at an interview roundtable on Saturday at the WonderCon convention in Anaheim, and one of the first subjects to come up involved the doubling of the number of episodes to 22 for Season 3. Is this a challenge for Mr. Davis and his team?
“It’s daunting, but I’ve split it up in my mind as two sets of twelve [episodes], so it’s a little easier that way, and I have great people working with me as well,” Davis confirms, particularly pointing to his co-executive producer, Christian Taylor, as a very helpful person that he can rely on. “He’s just amazing. He’s the person I’ll call up at 4 in the morning, and I’ll read the scene to him, and he’ll say ‘what about this line’ or ‘try this line’,” he says.
So what is the theme for the season? “I think Season 3 is all about alphas, and all about having power thrust upon you; having responsibility thrust upon you,” Davis confirms. “There’s a great quote from Twelfth Night that we kind of pull from. It’s played as a joke in the play, but it’s interesting to see this quote taken by business and made a mantra, which is ‘Some are born great. Some become great. Some have greatness thrust upon them.’ Which, if you look at it, is kind of true in the real world. We’re, in a way, working toward seeing how Scott and how others around him accept their power and accept their responsibilities. 
Allison has a redemption story, becoming a hero this season. Lydia is someone who we learn a lot more about, learning to accept her ability and whatever strange thing that may be, and Scott, in the way of accepting his responsibility and rising to greatness,” he says.
“In the 24 episodes, they’re broken into two twelve-episode stories that are connected in certain ways, but they each have their own mythologies; they each have their own mysteries. We like to create these seasons as kind of movies. I feel like we’ve gotten really comfortable with our paradigm after Season 2. Season 2, I think, was very complex, so one of the things we tried to do is simplify it a little, but we always seem to add a lot of twists and turns,” Davis continues.
Season 3 picks up four months after the previous season left off, and in those four months off screen, the show will have lost Jackson, as actor Colton Haynes has departed Teen Wolf for Starling City in a new role on The CW’s Arrow. The jump was created to give the show some breathing room. “It’s a way for… certain things are going to have to be mourned, like the loss of Jackson for Lydia, all of the strange changes that are happening within our characters… and it’s a way for us to get back into normal, so we can start in the normal world, in that very ‘Hero’s Journey’ sense, and then get them into an extraordinary adventure,” Davis explains.
Jeff Davis says that the Teen Wolf crew is “very happy” for Colton in his new role. “I know Greg Berlanti (Arrow producer), and Greg actually asked me about him. I said he’s a phenomenal actor, and I said ‘if you’re going to put him on the show, go for it.’ It looks like it’s going to be really good for him. I feel like with the second season, we had such a full character arc with Jackson that maybe it is time to bring it new blood, and one of the nice things about this show is that you can constantly keep bringing in new characters, so long as we remain faithful to the existing characters and make sure that we’ve got good arcs for them, we can bring in a lot of new people.”
Those new people include twins Max and Charlie Carver. “I think are going to be phenomenal additions to the season,” Jeff says. “First of all, they’re the greatest guys in the world. They’re incredibly nice, and incredible fun to be around. The cast has brought them in and accepted them as if they had always been there, which is nice to see in the cast. They’re going to be fun antagonists, but those characters are going to be on a moral fence. You don’t know if they’re going to be good, or if they’re going to stay evil, or if they’re eventually going to have a turnabout.”
They’re not the only ones coming in. We’ll also see some new characters entering the Alpha pack. “Gideon Emery plays Deucalion, the leader,” Davis says. “His name is taken from mythology as well; the son of Prometheus, and it’s a significant name. Gideon’s phenomenal. He’s a voice actor and has done a lot of voices in video games. He’s got this great presence, and he can do things with his voice that are extraordinary, and he’s also a great guy, too. He plays a very good bad guy. And then there’s Felisha Terrell playing Kali, who’s a powerful Alpha who uses the claws on her toes to kill. I say I wanted a Bond villain, basically, in her, like Famke Janssen in GoldenEye. She’s going to be great. She’s just so bad ass in the show. It’s going to be awesome. We’re really happy with the new characters, and it’s going to be hard to kill some of them off,” he laughs.
That is not to say that the supporting players that we already know will be forgotten. One of the folks at our interview asked about Danny (Keahu Kahuanui) and Lydia (Holland Roden), and Davis told us what we have to expect. “Danny, at the beginning of the season, is still skirting on the edges of our paranormal world, but Lydia is quite active,” Jeff explains. “We’re really happy with where her character is going this season. We have a lot of fun with her, and there’s a mystery surrounding her, why certain things happen and why she ends up certain places, and it’s a lot of fun to actually have her within the world now. So I think at a certain point with genre shows like this, the audience can get frustrated with certain characters never being in the know, and it happens on every show. I know it happened on Roswell, for one, and at a certain point, Buffy, everyone knew in the second season, and it made things a lot easier, to tell the stories. So, we’re gradually bringing people into the fold,” he says.
Another facet to Lydia’s storyline that we will see this season is a new partnership with Stiles. “The interesting thing that’s happened this season is that [Stiles] has a new relationship with Lydia, which we’re having a lot of fun with,” Davis says. “They’ve sort of taken on the intellectual side of the story. I call them our ‘David and Maddie from Moonlighting,’ basically. It’s nice to see that relationship growing, and to see these scenes… they’re really fun together. They have such good chemistry on-screen together, and it’s nice to see them now in a platonic relationship where he’s not constantly pining after her, but actually seeing her as a flesh and blood woman who can help and be helpful.”
Teen Wolf Season 3 begins June 3, 2013 on MTV. Come back to KSiteTV soon for more interviews and VIDEO! Also be sure to check out KSiteTV’s Teen Wolf forum!
