2018 San Diego Comic Con
Day 1 (July 19, 2018)
At this year’s San Diego Comic Con, we got a chance to speak with Emily Whitesell and Eric Wald, the showrunners of the Freeform hit series, Siren. Eric and Emily spoke on a range of issues including doling out story in the larger season and continuing to tell non-traditional relationship stories without judgment.
“Disney books is going to be creating a novel that tells a lot of that backstory of Charles Pownall and the mermaid, so they’re really going to dig into that. The origin story of that.”
After the jump, check out transcribed excerpts from the interview with Eric and Emily, as well as video of the full interview!
On what to expect in themes for Season 2 …
Emily: “A lot of our big themes will continue. Environmental themes, global warming, what’s happening in the oceans. And then, again, our relationship themes but not traditional relationships.”
On further exploring the relationships between all the characters …
Eric: “In Season 1, the scenes that worked so well with those intimate relationships, both between Ben and Ryn, but also Ryn and Maddie together. I mean that scene in the car where she’s touching her, it was just so electric between them. And so, that’s really exciting for us to explore. All sides of that relationship.”
Emily: “Without judgment.”
On dealing with storytelling with a larger episode order in Season 2 …
Emily: “What we try to do is split things up a little bit. And they will air eight and eight. So that really helps us organize our process. And we know that we need big moments for the end here and then another starting point there. So we break it down in that way. We know that we have many big stories we’ve been wanting to tell, and we know more about the pacing of the show at this point having done that first season so it’s easier to dole out how much story we will tell in those episodes.”
Eric: “What Freeform really learned was that even in a 10 episode season, viewers start to get a little tired so it’s nice to have a shorter order and to come back more quickly. So, the second eight will come back more quickly.”
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