Devlin in the detail
Sci-fi writer and producer supremo Dean Devlin previews his upcoming fantasy series The Librarians: The Next Chapter, offers his advice to aspiring writers and explains why he believes escapist entertainment should get more recognition.
When the popularity of a television series is so often boiled down to hard and fast numbers, sometimes it means more to hear directly from the people who tune in.
That was certainly the experience of sci-fi and fantasy showrunner Dean Devlin when he attended Electric Con, the convention hosted last October by his production and distribution company Electric Entertainment for fans of its stable of shows including The Librarians, Leverage, The Ark, The Outpost and Almost Paradise.
“It was also shockingly emotional,” he tells DQ. “I was not expecting it to be emotional. I was expecting it to be fun, but at least eight or nine times someone came over to me and said, ‘You know, your show saved my life.’”
One fan told Devlin how The Librarians helped them to deal with the grief of losing their father. Another revealed they had watched Leverage while receiving chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer.
“It was such an interesting thing, because so often genre entertainment or escapist entertainment is looked down on as a lesser art form,” the executive notes. “It doesn’t win Emmys, it doesn’t win Oscars. But the truth is, for a lot of people going through a pandemic, going through personal problems and divisive political times, life is hard enough. They want that little moment to get on a spaceship and get off the planet for an hour and forget about it, and you realise there’s a real function of escapist entertainment.
“This is not to put down big, dark and edgy serialised shows. But for a moment there, it seemed like that was the entire diet. Now you’re seeing this revival of ‘blue sky’ shows, and I think it’s because people need it.”
Launching on US cable network TNT in 2008, Leverage is an action crime series that introduced stars Timothy Hutton, Gina Bellman, Aldis Hodge, Christian Kane and Beth Riesgraf as a team brought together to use their specialist skills to fight against corporate and government injustices. Running for five seasons, the show was revived as Leverage: Redemption by Prime Video’s now-defunct Freevee in 2021, with its third season coming soon to Prime Video itself.
Meanwhile, The Librarians debuted in 2014 as a TNT series spin-off from a trilogy of feature films called The Librarian, in which Noah Wyle starred as the protector of a library filled with historical and often magical artefacts. The show, which follows four new people recruited by the Library, ran for four seasons.
Other Electric Entertainment scripted dramas include fantasy adventure The Outpost, which ran for four seasons on The CW, and Almost Paradise, a crime drama that marked the first US series to be filmed in the Philippines.
Sci-fi series The Ark then debuted on Syfy in 2023, telling the story of the Ark One spaceship that is transporting colonists away from a devastated Earth to a new home. When disaster strikes, leading to the deaths of its technical crew and senior leaders, the young survivors must band together maintain the ship and reach their destination.
Now this year will see the return of The Librarians with a new spin-off coming to TNT. The Librarians: The Next Chapter (pictured top) centres on a Librarian from the past who has time-travelled to the present and now finds himself stuck. When he returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent, leading him to partner with a new team to help him clean up the mess he has made, forming a new team of Librarians.
The new series – which was originally due to air on The CW but moved back to TNT with a two-season order – stars Callum McGowan (Jamestown), Jessica Green (The Outpost), Olivia Morris (Hotel Portofino) and Bluey Robinson (Britannia), with Caroline Loncq (Mammals) and Kane appearing in guest roles.
More than 20 years after The Librarian films were first released – the trilogy comprises adventures Quest for the Spear, Return to King Solomon’s Mines and Curse of the Judas Chalice – Devlin says he didn’t want to simply reboot the premise of the original series.
“In my mind, that story is still going on. It’s going on somewhere else. We started with the movie and it was this huge surprise hit that spawned two more sequels. TNT at the time was really bugging me to do a series, but at that time I didn’t know how to do the scale with a TV budget,” he says, having come from scriptwriting blockbuster feature films such as Independence Day, Stargate and Godzilla.
“But then we went and did Leverage, and I kept getting more and more ambitious. Finally I said to them, ‘Alright, I get television now. I can make what my ambitions are, I can do it within the budget,’ and we did The Librarians for four seasons.”
Though The Next Chapter was due set to premiere on The CW last autumn, “it became clear to me that this show really needs to be at TNT,” Devlin continues. “That’s where it was born. That’s the mother of the show. When I got a call from TNT to say, ‘Is there any way you can move this series?’ I said, ‘Let me see if I can.’ [The CW] said, ‘Look, we get it. This show is way better than it has any right to be and it deserves to be in a home like TNT.’ So they made a deal with us. They allowed us to move, which was incredible.”
Behind the scenes, Devlin is showrunner on both The Next Chapter and Almost Paradise, with John Glassner taking charge on The Ark. Devlin also ran the first two seasons of Leverage: Redemption before the original series showrunner John Rogers returned for S3.
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“I can’t wait for people to see [season three] because we’re over 100 episodes into Leverage, if you put them all together, and we have episodes unlike anything we’ve ever done,” he says. “It was so much fun to watch and have this many but suddenly see a brand-new episode that is completely unlike anything we’ve ever done before. It’s rare that you can get a format that allows that much flexibility with it.”
With a story-of-the week format to his series, it’s a wonder Devlin and his co-writers haven’t run out of plots. Yet it’s not just the stories that are constantly refreshed, but also the overarching themes that run across whole seasons, ensuring each one remains fresh and engaging for viewers.
“The Ark had an interesting evolution in that it was about these people who are not ready to run a spaceship, so season one was, ‘Can these people get to their destination before they were supposed to be leaders? Can they become the best versions of themselves?’” he says. “To some degree, it was a ‘disaster movie of the week.’ Something went wrong in each episode, and we knew that’s not really sustainable beyond one season.
“As we worked on season two, I realised it was actually a two-season-long [story]. So going into season three, it becomes another show that opens it up even wider. It’s been fun to watch the format of the show change as the episodes evolve, and if you end up watching season two, you’ll see now it’s a whole new show with a whole bunch more possibilities.”
Meanwhile, “Leverage is one that really surprised me,” he says. “I was always worried, ‘Well, at some point you’ll have seen the show,’ but our writers are so clever and the way the cast is designed, it just goes to places you never see coming. It’s been a lot of fun.”
Leverage had another surprise in store for Devlin when it emerged that the series was a hit among all four audience quadrants – young and older men and young and older women.
“When we started Leverage, I thought I was making a show for young men, and it tested the highest [ratings] in the history of TNT right across the board,” he says. “That wasn’t where I was aiming, but it’s where I hit, and a show like Almost Paradise surprised me because, again, I thought it was for a certain demographic. We were doing a tour of colleges for my daughter and the head of the literature department says, ‘Yeah, Almost Paradise is my favourite.’ Really, that’s your favourite show? It’s always surprising who likes the show and who gravitates towards it. Each show has its own set of surprises.”
But perhaps Devlin’s proudest achievement is using his shows to bring through a new generation of writers, many of whom are now showrunners in their own right. “It’s like, these are all my kids,” he jokes. “They’re these people I nurture and watch grow. Noah Wyle is writing and directing, and as much as I think he’s a great actor, he’s a better writer, he’s a better director.
“One of the things the Writers Guild was really upset about [during the 2023 writers strike] is that they said production companies aren’t really nurturing young writers now because they do these ‘mini rooms’ and they don’t let the writers go on set. I thought, ‘Well, is that true of us?’ I was able to identify 39 writers who started as baby writers for us who are now showrunners.”
His advice for aspiring screenwriters is to figure out their voice – and find reasons why someone should hire them over anyone else. Yet the paradox in television is that staff writers working in a writers room must also be able to write in the voice of the showrunner so that a series maintains its style and tone.
“That’s where it becomes really difficult, because a show has to feel like it’s consistent, but can your episodes feel like the show and yet have something that’s uniquely you?” he says. “Kate Rorick, who started out with us at the beginning of The Librarians, was a perfect example of this. She was someone writing romance novels, she got on the show and became one of the best writers. She’s now one of my top writers. Every time she writes, you would think it’s from the showrunners, except there’s something different about her episodes and it’s consistent and it’s consistently her voice.”
He adds: “That’s really the thing, finding your voice, understanding why your voice is your voice and then learning how to apply it.”
tagged in: Almost Paradise, Dean Devlin, Electric Entertainment, Leverage: Redemption, Prime Video, The Ark, The Librarians, The Librarians: The Next Chapter, The Outpost, TNT