Axiom's Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

Esai Morales is well know to many Science Fiction and Fantasy fans for his role as Major Edward Beck on the cancelled but not forgotten CBS series Jericho.  But now genre hounds will get to know him in a very different role from yet another landmark series.  He plays Joseph Adama in Caprica, the Syfy prequel to Battlestar Galactica, which premiered last Friday and airs its second episode tonight.  TV Guide recently talked with Morales about his portrayal of the patriarch of the iconic Adama family.  Following are some excerpts from that conversation and you can find the full interview at this link.

TVGuide.com: How did you get involved with the show?

Esai Morales: My manager told me to take a look at this. “This is a really classy show,” she said. “The creators are geniuses. It’s on Syfy, but they’re doing a whole rebranding thing. This could be a flagship show for them.” I wasn’t a BSG guy per se. I had kind of grown away from sci-fi in my adult years. I’m really happy to be back in a way that I don’t feel like I’m regressing to my childhood! There is nerd appeal, but at the same time, it’s something many people can identify with. It’s just a smart show and unlike anything I’ve seen on television.

TVGuide.com: Joseph Adama is sort of mythological since we’ve never met him until now. How would you describe him?

Morales: In reality, the myth is not as grandiose. We will be deconstructing a bit of the statue of the man and showing the human being. I’m not playing him as some sort of hero. I’m playing him as a man who is just trying to survive, stay on the right side of the law and be a good role model to what’s left of his family. He’d like to reconnect with the digital aftereffects of his own daughter. When he hugs and holds her, it’s as if [she's real] — except for one little thing: He can’t feel her heartbeat, which is that poetic representation. What are these things if they are not people? What do they feel? Where do they go when they’re in limbo?

TVGuide.com: Are you still filming? What can we expect coming up?

Morales: We are. [In] one of the episodes, I have to deal with possibly the most devastating drama that the character has faced yet. You would think after all he goes through it wouldn’t get worse, but it gets worse. We take a gamble and it doesn’t go well and we basically have to make a run. If I suggest too much, it’ll be obvious. I was literally in tears when I read it. I went to bed in tears with the thought that of that happening to me. [In the season finale], there might be a time jump. We might see them a few years later.

Read the Full Interview at TVGuide.com

Own the Caprica Premiere on DVD:

TV.com recently talked with actor Ryan McPartlin who plays Devon “Captain Awesome” Woodcomb on NBC’s Chuck.  Following are some excerpts of his conversation about the series and its upcoming season and you can read the full interview at this link.  (Chuck Season 3 premieres this Sunday at 8 PM EST with a two hour special before returning to its regular Monday 8 PM EST timelsot)

TV.com: What was your reaction when you first found out that Devon was going to be in on Chuck’s secret?

RM: I read it in a script. Nobody really told me about it, because they were afraid I was going to spill the secret in interviews. So when I found out, I was excited and nervous. I knew that the audience was waiting to see one of the people from Chuck’s home life or work life find out who he was. And I knew that if I didn’t pull it off, it wasn’t going to be that big of an ending. And Season 3 was still kind of on the line, so everybody had to buy into the next part of the rollercoaster ride.

TV.com: Without giving too much away, how much does Devon know about Chuck’s world? Will we be seeing more of that as the season progresses?

RM: It’s no secret that Captain Awesome gets into the spy world … and thinks that, without years of training and hard work, that he can just jump in and take it on. And I love that I kind of go over Chuck’s head a little bit. It’s going to be great.

TV.com: Devon has obviously developed a lot over the past two seasons. What was your approach to playing him back when he was just Captain Awesome? We didn’t know much about him, except that he seemed to be the perfect boyfriend.

RM: My approach was, I called my agent and said, “I don’t think this character’s going to be around long. [laughs] You better get me another job.” I worked hard and I tried to deliver the funny as much as possible in the first few episodes of the series. I had a lot of fun, I could relate to the character. I based him a little bit off of a friend of mine, who literally is Captain Awesome. He wants to be the best at everything, so he’ll drink all night and then wake up at 5:30am to train for Iron Man.

Read the full interview at TV.com

Catch up with Seasons 1 and 2 of Chuck on DVD:

TV Guide recently interviewed Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse about the final season of Lost (premiering February 2nd) and how it will play out.  Following are some excerpts from that conversation and you can read the full interview at this link.

TVGuide.com: With the final season of Lost approaching, what are you feeling?

Carlton Cuse: I think we’re doing something new in this final season narratively, so we have that combination of fear and giddiness. The fear is, oh, what if people don’t like it, what if the audience doesn’t like what we’re doing? The giddiness is, like, we always feel like we have to be bold with our show and if it works, and if people like it as much as we do, we feel like the final season will be a success. When there’s a draw though, we stand by our decisions. We’re not playing it safe in the final season.

Damon Lindelof: I think at this point, the nervousness is more based on how we’re so deep into this season, that by the time the audience sees it, we’re committed to our path. It’s been like that ever since we started premiering in January and February. It’s like it’s too late to turn back now. We’re feeling very confident about executing what our plan was, and that’s all you can ever do.

TVGuide.com: What do you say to fans with such high expectations for your last season?

Cuse: I think it’s like anything in life. I think that you have to have realistic expectations. We’re going to do our best version of the show, but there’s still going to be some mystery and magic and intentionally ambiguous things that emerge at the end of the show. We’re going to answer questions, but at the same time, we’re going to tell the story the way we want to tell it. We feel like, all we can do is make the version of the show that makes Damon and I happy. If we do that, hopefully enough people will like it.

Lindelof: Ditto.

Read the Full Interview at TVGuide.com

Buy the Previous Season of Lost on DVD from Amazon.com:

The Season 3 premiere of Chuck is just a few short weeks away (check our Mid-Season Preview page for more info) and TV Guide recently talked with the show’s creator Josh Schwartz.  Following are a few excerpts from the conversation and you can read the full interview at this link.

TVGuide.com: What would you say is the overall arc this season?

Schwartz: In terms of the arc of the season, Chris Fedak and I always talk about telling the superhero story in parts. It was a guy, an innocent, who was thrust into this world and coming to terms with those powers. It was boy becomes man last year, and this year it’s man becomes spy. It’s really about Chuck accepting and wanting to do this thing and stepping up into the thing that he felt like he was thrust into.

TVGuide.com: I take it he doesn’t deal with it very well.

Schwartz: For a while, he was reluctant. “How do I get this thing out of my head? I just want my normal life back.” This season is, “No, I don’t want my normal life, I want to do this and I want to do it well.” It’s a real evolution in Chuck’s character, which will be satisfying for the fans. We’re not playing the same game. The character is evolving and maturing while still remaining adorable.

TVGuide.com: Does he always have in the back of his mind that being a spy puts his family in even more danger?

Schwartz: Yeah, and that’s really going to be at the forefront this year. Captain Awesome [Ryan McPartlin] found out last year and he’s going to be thrust into this world to a much higher degree than even Chuck anticipated. We get to see how awesome Awesome really is.

Read the Full Interview at TVGuide.com

Buy Chuck Seasons One and Two on DVD from Amazon.com:

Did you really think that DC was going to kill off Bruce Wayne?  Didn’t think so.  Comic book icon Grant Morrison will be writing the new series Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne and USA Today recently interviewed him on the topic.  Here are a few excerpts from that discussion and you can read the full interview at TFAW.com’s blog:

Q: In Final Crisis, the original Batman, Bruce Wayne, is hit by the Omega Beam during a battle with the villain Darkseid. This beam sends Wayne spinning into the unknown, cast off into the time stream. He is thought to be dead by both friends and enemies. In the aftermath, the role of Batman is assumed by the original Robin, Dick Grayson, and the role of Robin is assumed by Bruce Wayne’s son, Damian. What else should readers know as a lead-in to The Return of Bruce Wayne?

A: Could there possibly be anything else to know after that masterful summing-up?

To be honest, I don’t think readers need to know even that much in order to enjoy Return. Although it’s also the latest chapter in the long-running, “definitive” Batman epic I’ve been trying to pull off since 2005, Return has been structured and written to read as a complete story on its own — everything a new reader needs to know will be in the pages of the book itself. Read all the graphic novel collections together, however, and a much bigger, more complex and involving story will emerge.

Return is a fairly intricate time-travel story in which the world’s greatest hero, the optimum man, is up against the supreme challenge to his ingenuity and skill. How does Batman get out of the ultimate trap? It has a mystery and an apocalyptic countdown going on, there are some major twists and reveals, and it sets up big changes to the Batman universe status quo.

Q: It’s my understanding that Return will follow Bruce Wayne through different eras as he makes his way — presumably — back to the modern day. Any hints on which eras we might see Bruce exploring in his quest to find his proper place in time?

A: The first episode is set in the Late-Paleolithic Era, the second is in Pilgrim-era Gotham Village, and we also get to see Gotham in Western or noir style.

Each of the stories is a twist on a different “pulp hero” genre — so there’s the caveman story, the witchhunter/Puritan adventurer thing, the pirate Batman, the cowboy, the P.I. — as a nod toward those mad old 1950s comics with Caveman Batman and Viking Batman adventures. It’s Bruce Wayne’s ultimate challenge — Batman vs. history itself!

I’ve tried to thoroughly research each time period so that the stories work not only as at least fairly plausible reconstructions of life in the real 17th or 19th centuries but also as romanticized “pulp” versions too, while at the same time referencing the more extravagant history of the fictional DC Comics Universe in the background.

Q: How many issues are planned for The Return of Bruce Wayne series?

A: There are six issues of Return. The first one’s 38 pages long, the rest are 30.

Read the full interview at TFAW.com’s blog

TV Guide recently talked with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse about Lost which is getting ready to kick off its sixth and final season in 2010 (read more at our Spring 2010 Television Preview page).  Following are some excerpts from that conversation and you can read the full interview at this link.

TVGuide.com: Tell me about how each of you got involved with Lost.

Damon Lindelof: I got a call from an executive at ABC named Heather Kadin. It was late January. She was tasked with trying to coerce J.J. Abrams into rewriting a script that they had about a plane that had crashed on an island. J.J. said that he did not have time to do this because he was writing another pilot for ABC at the time and running Alias and trying to launch his feature career.

[Since I was a] stalker of J.J. and his work, Heather basically felt like this was a prime opportunity to put me in a room with him, even if the project went nowhere. I jumped at the chance. I met with J.J. on a Monday afternoon and we ended up geeking out for four hours, and five days later we had the outline for Lost. Ten weeks after that, we had the two-hour premiere completed.

Carlton Cuse: I created and ran a show called Nash Bridges and I hired Damon to be a writer on that show. We not only had a really good professional relationship, but we developed a really strong [friendship]. After the pilot process that Damon described, J.J. left to go do [Mission: Impossible 3] with Tom Cruise. Damon and I had been talking about the show and I had sort of fallen in love with what J.J. and Damon had done in the pilot and the world that had been created.

There were very few people who believed this premise was sustainable as a series, and that was incredibly liberating for me. Damon and I would sit down and have breakfast every morning — as we continue to do to this day — and we kind of approached it like it was just 12 episodes and out, how do we make these the 12 greatest episodes of television that we would want to see ourselves? We basically liberated ourselves from all the rules of traditional television narrative. We thought this thing would probably end up on DVD and would be like Twin Peaks or The Prisoner.

TVGuide.com: How do you respond to the criticism that people who were passionate about the show at the beginning have gotten “lost” along the way? Do you ever think: We’ve made things too complicated. We need to be simpler.

Cuse: In order to sustain a show over what ultimately will be 120 episodes, it has to be complex. If you took a non-Harry Potter viewer and asked them to watch the fourth or fifth movie, I think they’d be very confused about what’s going on. We feel like Season 5 was the highest degree of difficulty. We hope that a lot of viewers who left will come back for the end of the show. We tried to design the show with a certain circularity and we feel like Season 6 will be very much like Season 1 and while you do need to know backstories to follow what’s going on in Season 6, it’s very character-centric.

Read the Full Interview at TVGuide.com

TFAW.com recently interviewed Dan Shotz and Cody DeMatteis about the Jericho Season 3 comic book which hit the stand last week.  Following are some nuggets from that discussion and you can catch the full interview at TFAW.com’s blog.

TFAW.com: Jericho was much loved by fans–so much so that they were able to bring it back to CBS for a second season after cancellation. What made you decide to bring it back as a comic?

DS: This has always been about the fans. They are so passionate and have inspired us to keep the story going. They made history when they brought the show back for a second season and we, the writers and producers of the series, wanted to continue the story for them in different ways. This story is very close to our hearts and we feel like we have so much more to tell.

TFAW.com: Where does Jericho Season 3 pick up, storywise? Of course, this series has “Civil War” right in the title. Can you tell us about that?

DS: We left Season 2 with a Civil War looming between the East and the West. And now we have the opportunity to show it. The first group of books will deal with the Civil War on the verge of breaking out and the repercussions of living in a potential war zone. Jake and Hawkins will be directly involved with the outcome of the war itself, while the Jericho citizens will be fighting a resistance from within the new Allied States.

TFAW.com: Dan, what was it like adapting Jericho from television to comics? Were there any particular challenges?

DS: As the writers of the first issue, Robert Levine and I found it very freeing. The comic book form allows us to go big without restrictions. When you are working on a TV series, we are limited by budget and time concerns. When you want a tank to arrive on set, it costs serious money. With a great artist, we can fill a base with a dozen tanks free of charge.

Read the full interview at TFAW.com

Read Johnny Jay’s Review of Jericho Season 3 #1

Buy Jericho Season 3 from TFAW.com at 20% Off!

TFAW.com recently interviewed author William F. Nolan about the upcoming comic book series Logan’s Run: Last Day.  Following is an excerpt from that interview and you can read the full conversation at this link.

TFAW.com: We were really excited to hear about Logan’s Run: Last Day, the new comic book adaptation of your novel. How did the comic come about?

Nolan: My good friend and author/filmmaker Jason V. Brock (Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man) and his wife Sunni saw an article about Bluewater in the local Vancouver, WA paper. Jason does some agenting on my behalf and contacted Darren G. Davis, the president of Bluewater.

We scheduled a meeting at their offices in Vancouver, and they were very excited about the Logan property. Jason (who is also an artist and the Art Director/Managing Editor of Dark Discoveries magazine) and I assisted in working on the designs and costumes for some of the characters, which they are using in the final comic. Also, Jason had come up with a great storyline for a new Logan book we are outlining that uses the original book and expands on the backstory, updating it significantly.

That’s where Paul J. Salamoff comes in: he was chosen to adapt the novels into comic format, but none of us really wanted a “straight” adaptation of the books–it’s been done by MGM, Marvel, Malibu Graphics, and so on. It was time for a fresh take on Logan. Paul was perfect for the job. Not to mention that the four of us–Darren, Paul, Jason, and myself–all work well together and have gotten to be friends.

TFAW.com: Logan’s Run isn’t a stranger to comics. Other publishers have done mini-series adaptations over the years. Is there something special in today’s world that prompted you to move forward with an adaptation?

Nolan: I was not happy with Marvel or Malibu’s versions. I very much disliked the art in the Malibu edition, though they were faithful to the books. As far as the Marvel version, it was just too “superhero”: Logan is a real character, not a superheroic one, and I was never that pleased with it. In addition, they were really adapting the MGM movie, which is flawed, not the book that I wrote with George Clayton Johnson.

Given the current trend of Hollywood getting interested in comic book works, I feel that this is the perfect time to get a really great version of Logan out there . . . and this is the one.

Read the full interview at TFAW.com

Buy Logan’s Run: Last Day and Other Comics and Toys from TFAW.com