SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Eternally Yours pilot.
Move over Woodstone Mansion residents, there’s another ragtag supernatural family joining CBS‘ Thursday nights. Ghosts creators Joe Port and Joe Wiseman debuted their long-gestated vampire comedy Eternally Yours last week after more than a decade in the making.
Eternally Yours is based on a simple premise with a world of storytelling possibilities: It’s easier to swear ’til death do us part when you’re not going to live forever. So, what happens when you actually have to spend centuries with your loved ones?
Ed Weeks plays Charles, the ancient head of the home who is not so open to the progressive state of the world as his wife Liz (Allegra Edwards). They live with their daughter Emma (Helen J. Shen) and son Jesse (Parker Young), two younger vampires who they picked up somewhere along the way in the last 500 years, their human daughter-in-law Phyllis (Rose Abdoo) and their half-human, half-vampire grandchildren Henry (Shylo Molina) and Mort (Tristan Michael Brown).
After last Tuesday’s pilot, their family is about to get a little bigger now that Emma’s boyfriend Max (Jaren Lewison) is also a vampire. Thank Mort for that one.
“There’s the focus on these three very different couples who are all in different stages of relationships, and there’s going to be a lot of exploration of that,” Port says of how the first season will continue to unfold.
After selling the pilot to CBS over 11 years ago, Port and Wiseman say they figured the idea was long dead. That is, until they began working on Ghosts. In the interview below, Port and Wiseman discuss bringing Eternally Yours to life and what’s to come from the first season as Max learns to be a vampire.
DEADLINE: When you first conceived of this show all those years ago, what was the inspiration?
JOE WISEMAN: So, believe it or not, the main relationship in the show, Liz and Charles is sort of based on Joe and myself. At the time, we were 15 or 16 years into a writing partner relationship. We love each other, but we also annoy each other, and we just started talking about: How can we dramatize two people who are kind of contractually stuck together? And we took that to the nth degree with like, well, vampires live forever, and what if in our mythology they weren’t allowed to get divorced, and you’ve been married for 500 years? So that was sort of the inspiration.
JOE PORT: I think also I always thought it was funny, those scenes in movies like Twilight where they make this commitment without really thinking through the consequences, and you never really see the consequences in most of those movies and shows. So it just seemed like a natural comedic thing to explore. After the lust dies down in the moment, where you’re asking someone to turn you into a vampire so you can be with them forever, what it’s like to see what forever is really like?
DEADLINE: How did the pilot change and the idea evolve over the course of these years as you’ve worked on other projects?
PORT: honestly, not much. It’s very similar to the script we wrote 11 years ago. We made some changes based on necessity of shooting in Montreal in the winter. The accident where Max gets hit in the head and they end up turning him into a vampire used to be a car crash that took place outside. But we like this thing where they were trying the telekinesis, because it’s very vampirey, obviously. I think more than anything, it just affected the cast that we ended up with, because the timing allowed us to get this cast and the people were the right ages, and we’re really happy with who we got.
DEADLINE: This project ultimately led to Ghosts, where you were adapting an existing format. Did you take anything from that process that you think has aided you here?
WISEMAN: For sure. We’ve been doing Ghosts for a long time, and I think we concretized the idea in our minds that we’re doing a fun supernatural show, but the stories have to be relatable and grounded to the audience. So, ultimately, we’re doing stories that anyone can relate to, and then we have this nice supernatural dressing to put on it, which makes it unique and fun. But it was really knowing that we still had to be grounded and real. I think was was one of the bigger takeaways we’ve learned from doing Ghosts.
PORT: I think doing Ghosts for the past six years has been really helpful in terms of giving us a template for doling out mythology and lore. It’s good to parse things out slowly. Also, just how to kind of pace a season and deal with multiple characters. It’s been a great training ground.
DEADLINE: Did you find that you had a different type of creative attachment to this show as you were going through the process of bringing on other collaborators, casting, etc? You’ve been working on it for so long. I just wonder what it was like to kind of finally bring other people into it?
PORT: It’s just so exciting for us. We’ve written a lot of pilots and shot a lot of pilots that didn’t get on, and you never get a chance to revisit them. So this one didn’t shoot previously, but I think we just assumed it would never get made. So it’s thrilling to get a chance to revisit it. In terms of which one we’re attached to more, I really love Ghosts, and we’re so like deep into that one. It was our first show that got on and did well. So we’re very sentimentally attached to Ghosts, but obviously, we hope to be the same way about this, and it comes from an autobiographical beginning, as Joe was talking about. So it’s special to us for that reason.
WISEMAN: The two are very entwined. We originally sold and wrote Eternally Yours for CBS, and then it didn’t get shot. But because of that, when they acquired the Ghosts property, they thought of us. They were like, ‘Hey, they wrote that supernatural genre of comedy. Maybe they’d be interested.’ So because of Eternally Yours, we got Ghosts, and then because of the success of Ghosts, we were able to revisit. So the two are very intertwined in our minds, and we love them both. They’re both our babies.
DEADLINE: Have you thought about opportunities for crossover?
WISEMAN: Yes, we’ve discussed that a lot. That’s something we would definitely try to do.
DEADLINE: Who was the hardest to cast from Eternally Yours?
PORT: That’s a good question. I mean, the kids are always difficult to cast. We hadn’t really cast kids before. In Ghosts, we don’t have any kids, obviously. So I thought that was probably the trickiest parts to cast. We’re really excited about everyone we ended up with. Ed Weeks was someone that — we had done a Dead Pilot Society table read like six years ago, and he read the part of Charles, and we always had his voice in our heads ever since then. Some of the other people we had as guest stars on Ghosts. [Casting directors] Liz Barnes and Tannis Vallely, they cast both shows, and they always bring us amazing options. I usually find that it’s people they’ve ended up bringing us on the first day or second day end up being the ones who get the part, even though we go through a process and take a month to look at everyone else.
DEADLINE: I love Rose Abdoo in the show. She’s so funny, and I recently saw her on the Emmys carpet, and she was just talking up Eternally Yours to everyone.
PORT: Her character has a lot of growth this season. We start off and it’s a bit of a joke with him mind wiping her, but we kept that in for a reason. Max being there now is going to help us and our characters explore some of the moral and ethical implications of that kind of thing. She comes into contact with a lot of things she didn’t know previously when the season starts.
DEADLINE: That’s a nice segue, because I was going to ask if you could give a little tease of what kind of vampire Max is going to be.
WISEMAN: Max, at first, is a little bit in denial, but he’s kind of a straight-A nerd student [and] he becomes obsessed and really interested in learning all he can about vampire lore, eventually. So he’s going to be a very enthusiastic vampire. Although, some of the darker sides, vampires traditionally have killed and fed on humans, and he’s not into all that stuff. It’s kind of like going through puberty. It can be a long, drawn out, awkward process as you become a vampire and develop different powers and learn how to deal with various urges that you’ve never experienced before.
PORT: Puberty is one analogy. I would also say it’s like converting to a new religion and being the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable person about that in the family, even though you didn’t start off as that religion.
DEADLINE: As soon as Max becomes a vampire, so many stories open up to explore between all of these characters but especially the three couples. What should we expect from the dynamics in the house this season?
PORT: There’s the focus on these three very different couples who are all in different stages of relationships, and there’s going to be a lot of exploration of that. Max, being new to the coven, is a bit of a change agent, and he’s going to help weigh in on things that have been long-brewing resentments and issues, and shine a new light on them and help people explore ways to get past them. It’s a family show, too. We’ve got these really funny teenage twin sons, one of whom has all the good vampire powers. The other one only can read the dog’s mind. We’re gonna explore that. So I think it’s really a show that has a lot of entry points for different folks.
WISEMAN: We have a Halloween episode. We have a Christmas episode. So we’re going to see how our vampire family views those holidays and how they celebrate them.
DEADLINE: I’m glad you mention holiday episodes, since the Ghosts Halloween episode is approaching. What are you looking forward to about that?
WISEMAN: It’s a really good episode. We meet a new type of ghost that we’ve never met before. We get to meet Hetty’s often-referred-to, mustachioed sister Margaret, who we’ve never met before. A lot of stuff happens. A lot of very exciting, big stuff happens.
The second episode of Eternally Yours airs Thursday night on CBS at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT. Ghosts will return for a special Halloween episode on October 29.