Colin Ferguson as Eureka's Sheriff Jack Carter. Photo by Justin Stephens and copyright of Syfy.
It was back in 2006 that Syfy’s Eureka premiered and the-then U.S. Marshall Jack Carter along with his daughter Zoe wound up in the small Pacific Northwest town called Eureka after having a bit of car trouble. Neither of them realized that what started out as a small inconvenience would forever change their lives. Carter found himself in the middle of a scientific mishap created by one of the local geniuses and he helped save the day. His efforts resulted in a job transfer to town sheriff, and ever since then it has been one big adventure for both Carter and Zoe.
Sadly, Eureka is coming to end an end this spring, with its fifth and final season beginning tonight, Monday, April 16th @ 9:00 p.m. EST/PST, on Syfy. A couple of weeks ago, Colin Ferguson (Jack Carter) and series co-creator, executive producer and co-show runner Jaime Paglia happily spoke at length with journalists about their work on the series. The following is an edited version of that Q & A. Enjoy!
This is such a basic question, but what do we have to look forward to with this final season of Eureka?
Colin Ferguson: Well, I just want to say right out of the gate, that I’m usually the king of pessimism. I’m the king of like, well, we did okay. However, over the past couple of days I’ve watched the first three episodes (of season five) and I’m so proud of them from a production standpoint, a writing standpoint and an acting standpoint. I’d put them up against anything. That might sound cocky and stupid, but I’m so excited for this season to come out. It’s the best thing that we’ve done. Jaime, you can take it from there.
Jaime Paglia: Gee, I never even make Colin happy, so that’s high praise indeed (he jokes). I do feel like our last two seasons, seasons four and five, and if you want to call it 4.5 in there as well, that everybody has really done their best work.
We just had the most amazing creative team, from our cast and crew to the writing staff, and we’ve really raised the bar once again with the level of work, I think, even after season four. What you’re sort of dealing with over the course of these back episodes are the ramifications of the experience that our characters have during the first three episodes of this (fifth) season.
So storylines will be spun out of their experience, not just psychologically as far as what’s happened to them on a character level, but physically as well with what they’ve gone through and how that actually impacts individual storylines.
CF: And this season there’s some of the funniest stuff that we’ve done. I mean, this is the show that we always wanted to make, where things are really character-driven and fun. They (the writers) did such a great job of knowing this cast and oh, this person does this and we’re going to let them fly, and this person does this and we’re going to let them fly. It was really exciting for us.
JP: Yes, this season was the most fun to make.
Jaime, I want to go from what Colin said a minute ago about the show you’ve always wanted to make. Eureka has been a terrific show from the beginning, but it’s also had so many interesting twists and turns along the way. Is this always where you thought it would be after five years or are you really surprised at where it is at this point? What during this journey has just been different from what you thought it would be?
JP: You know, honestly I didn’t know what to expect on this journey when we started it. This was my first foray into television, and having done a few feature films that didn’t get made and working with some amazing producers in the studios, it was exciting to get to finally make something.
And it’s such a different animal, making television as opposed to movies, because you don’t have ten weeks to mull a script over and two years to turn it in. Usually you’re creating and putting it up on the screen in a very short amount of time, and like any show, we all had the growing pains of just trying to figure out what the show was, and all of us meaning not just the writers or producers, but also the cast finding their characters. It’s an evolving creative as well as collaborative process, which I really enjoy.
There are two enormous plot twists at the beginning and at the end of the season five opener. Did you think there would be those kinds of big plot twists? And when you look at where the show is at now compared to where it was five years ago, does it at all surprise you?
JP: I don’t know if surprise is the right word. It certainly excites me. We found different opportunities as our stories have evolved over the seasons, and there were things we did in season one that we weren’t able to, I think, fully complete in terms of some set-ups, like Beverly Barlowe (played by Debrah Farentino) and the Consortium and the other sort of longer story arcs that had been part of the mythology and that we had hoped were going to continue.
Due to a number of reasons, though, they got truncated a bit in seasons two and three, so it was nice to be able to kind of come back around full circle and satisfy some of the things we had originally wanted to do.
A very quick example is the Astraeus mission, which was a passion of my co-show runner’s Bruce Miller. He really wanted to do a series of storylines about going into space. However, we didn’t know where that would lead us, and I was very apprehensive about starting down a road that I didn’t know where the end was. But it actually forced me and our team to say, OK, what’s going to be the interesting twist? What’s going to happen? So that’s exactly what led to the episodes that you will see.
Colin, what were your expectations when you first signed on with this show? How long did you see it going? What did you see it amounting to, and when did it meet your expectations or surpass them?
CF: When we first signed on and starting shooting, there was a psychic convention going on near to where we were filming, so Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Dr. Allison Blake) and I had our futures read. The psychic said that the show would run for a while, but it wasn’t going to be what we thought it would be, and nothing could truer. I mean, with the writers’ strike as well as the recession, and then doing 20 episodes and having them split over a bunch of seasons - that was the hard bit of what went down that nobody could see coming. The amazing thing is to get to where we got to this year.
To answer your question of was I surprised, yes, I was stunned that we could do what we did, and it’s only in the Sci-Fi genre that you can. In other genres when you reinvent the wheel, you bring in a new character, you bring in an evil twin; you bring in whoever. it’s sort of standard stuff. But it’s a testament to our writers’ imagination that we could, for example, go back in time and discover a new Eureka in one season.
And then this season there are some of the greatest plot twists that only this genre can afford. It was a joy to marry that sort of structure change – which I feel lucky to be able to do – with the unbelievable character stuff that they were writing for us. I never saw this coming and I’m stunned with what it’s become. I’m so proud, particularly when watching these episodes. So I guess that’s my take on the last bunch of years. I never saw this coming.
JP: Let me just add to that. We’ve had this amazing cast, and, in particular, I feel Colin’s gifts as both a dramatic actor and a comedian lent themselves to us being able to write essentially anything. This cast can take a scene and have you in tears one moment, and then laughing through those tears in the next. That sort of magical chemistry is very rare, I think, and you see a lot of shows struggle with it. We’ve just been unbelievably blessed with the group of people that we’ve had to write for.
Colin and Jaime, when Eurekacame onto the landscape Sci-Fi was more space-driven and the whole Battlestar Galactica-type style that fans were used to. Eurekareally changed the landscape, though, in showing how great Sci-Fi can take place today and in funky little towns and such. I’d like to get your perspective on how much the show has influenced not just Syfy the channel, but also the genre as a whole.
CF: Wow. OK, sure. I’ll take a quick pass. I don’t know if I can speak to how it’s affected the genre as a whole because I don’t have a ton of perspective on it. I know that when we came on we were told no space or aliens. And this is also my first lead role that’s gone for a long time, and Jaime’s first TV thing that’s gone for a long time. So the two of us were sort of finding our way in our jobs over the course of it, and we’d get marching orders like no space, no aliens, no comedy, etc. So fast-forward to this last season and a show with some comedic beats and where we’ve sent a ship into outer space.
As far as how it’s affected the genre? I mean, I’m proud of the fact that we succeeded and even prouder of the fact that no one really knew at first what we were doing in a sense. It’s been a fun journey to go on. I’m rambling, Jaime. You can just slap me in the face and take over (he jokes).
JP: I think you’ve pretty much covered it, Colin. I think that the interesting thing was we first took this pitch in to Syfy and they bought it in the room, but then In the follow-up meeting, Mark Stern (President of Original Content at Syfy), who has shepherded us from the very beginning, said, “You know, we didn’t really know what we were missing on our channel until we heard this concept,” because they weren’t doing really kind of grounded, earth-based Sci-Fi, especially with a sense of humor.
I think we were kind of inadvertently creating something that was sort of all the favorite things that we like to watch on TV as well as write, and kind of blending them all together into an Earthbound Sci-Fi space dramedy that hadn’t really been done before.
I can’t say that it was our plan to create that. I think that just sort of ended up being the outcome. And I am proud that it has opened up the possibilities for other shows and that Syfy has had more success with shows such as Warehouse 13, Haven and Alphas, which is coming into its second season. Incidentally, there’s a lot of great talent from the Eureka team that’s going over to Alphas. We had a good run and, again, I’m proud of the show that we’ve been able to do.
Once you found out that this was going to be the final season, did you need to make a lot of changes to your original plans for the season in order to make sure things were wrapped up properly?
JP: Yes. I’m sure most people probably remember the sort of publicity debacle about us having been picked up for a sixth season, but only for six episodes. That was one week, and then we were actually on the final day of prep for the season finale, which was a huge cliffhanger that was going to set up what season six was going to be.
Originally we and the network were all on board with wanting this to be a full season order for season six, so it was already a little bit of a surprise that for budget reasons it was only going to be six episodes. But we thought, “Well, OK, we can truncate some of those storylines and get it down to six episodes.” But then on, I think, a Monday at five o’clock we got the phone call telling us that there was not going to be a sixth season and that was it.
Mark Stern called me and Bruce Miller personally to give us the news, and, you know, of course it was impossible to course correct the script at this point. It would have just been this giant cliffhanger with no resolution for the characters, much less the storylines.
So we asked if there was any chance of having one more episode, and Mark said he would support that. However, because of various circumstances it couldn’t be a single unilateral decision. So it took 24 hours before we got the answer that we could have one more episode. We told the writers the good news the following Wednesday that we had one more episode. The bad news was that a script had to be written almost immediately.
Normally it’s a two-month process of breaking the story, writing an outline, getting notes on an outline, writing a first draft, getting notes on that first draft, polishing it, etc. We ended up breaking the story in two days, which I think is a testament to our creative team. I had different writers writing pieces of the outline, and I started writing the script as soon as we had a notion of what we were going to do. Basically I wrote the episode in three days over the weekend, and the following Monday we began prepping it. That’s typically a seven day process, but we only had four days. Given the sort of constraints that we were under, and the pressures to really wrap up a lot of things, especially character storylines, I’m proud of the episode that we actually ended up delivering.
Colin, how do you think your character has evolved from the very beginning of the show, and this season coming up, where do you see it going?
CF: I love what they’ve done with my character’s evolution. The funniest thing about looking back on the whole experience is that the writers were always down in Los Angeles and we were up in Vancouver, but there was a great deal of commonality with what Jaime was going through and what I was going through and what Jaime was trying to do and what I was trying to do.
Again, we were always given sort of marching orders, like there needs to be more standalone type episodes, but Jaime in his way was always saying, well, OK, but can we put more drama in? Can we put more jokes in? He was always looking for different ways to add things, and I was doing the same. So with that sort of being the model of what happened, I want to say once again that I’m really proud with what we pulled off.
Character-wise, Jack Carter started as a guy who was a bad father as well as very closed off to people and all about his work. However, by the end of it, he had really embraced not only his daughter and his family, but a community of scientists and people along with in a sense, life, really. As many times as maybe Jack saved Eureka, I think ultimately Eureka saved him, and that might be the most poignant salvation of all of it for me.
What will the two of you miss the most, about, you know, working on Eureka?
JP: For me, honestly, it’s the people that we got to work with. I mean, the creative process is great. I love writing and making the show, but we have, I think, a really unique group, and from the writing and producing staff to the post-production department and our visual effects guys and our cast and crew, we genuinely like each other.
We like to spend time together and would frequently get comments from other writing staffs that they’d never seen a staff that voluntarily goes to lunch together instead of wanting to get the hell away from one another after being in the writers’ room all day. We also spent time with cast and crew on the weekends when we had down time.
The people we have on the show have just been amazing individuals as well as creative talents, and that is something I’m definitely going to miss having every day. I’m looking forward to building the next show so that I can try to build some semblance of that again.
CF: That’s exactly right, and I think that comes from Jaime. He’s a phenomenal human being and sets that tone in the (writers’) room, which then trickles down to the set. That’s exactly what he’ll do on his next show, is build that same structure again, and I know that that room will be just as happy and just as good a place to live and work.
For me, I’m going to miss, gosh, probably the (creative) process as well. I mean, I’m so proud that this is our swan song. If we could do this show, this final season, forever, that would be amazing. This is always the show that we struggled to make and I’m so happy that we got to make it in our final season. I have a lot of fond memories and a lot of dear, dear friends that have come out of it, and it’s nice to meet up with them socially now.
So it’s the people along with the process and the luxury of being able to shoot how we shot with the level of talent we had. There was also being able to do scenes that have both drama and comedy. You earn a level of autonomy after five years, and starting at square one again is hard. And in our various ways we’re all doing just that as we speak.
Episode-wise, are there any that stand out for the both of you during the course of the run of the show?
CF: Yes, I have my favorites. The plot twist coming up at the start of this season is probably my favorite twist of all. I pushed so hard in my own, you know, ineffective way because I wanted this year’s premiere to be attached to last season’s finale because I loved the plot twist so much.
One of my favorite episodes is actually the one that Jaime directed, Jack of all Trades. I also loved Smarter Carter, Up in the Air and You Face or Mine, which was my directorial debut. That will always be a phenomenal time in my life, and also the first time Erica Cerra (Jo Lupo) got a big plot line. To be there for her was amazing; to be there for Alexandra, our script coordinator’s first episode was amazing as well. How funny! All of my favorite episodes are someone’s directorial debut. It’s the best. You can’t top it. How about you, Jaime?
JP: You actually named several of my very favorite episodes, Colin, but the truth is those are the stories that I love the most. For Colin’s directorial debut, Your Face or Mine, I wrote a small character episode, and I think all of us really love what you can do when you have the time and you’re not necessarily having the world about to explode. Where the stakes are smaller from the danger standpoint, but the character development is a lot higher.
I think from season one my very favorite episode still is Once in a Lifetime, the season finale. I felt like that was the episode where we found the right balance of real, true emotional drama and humor. That was kind of the benchmark going forward for us. Founder’s Day will always be a favorite, too, just because we were getting to create a new world with a new time, and that had been an idea that I’d had since season one, wanting to go back to the origins of the town,.
We were never able to afford it for various reasons, you know, mostly because of the standing sets that you would have to build. However, we managed to pull it off, thanks in large part to Matt Hastings, who directed it, and Robert Petrovicz, our producer, who physically managed to coordinate that entire production, along with my co-show runners Bruce Miller and Todd Sharpe, who have both been amazing partners these last couple of seasons. Just creatively being able to get that stuff done was definitely a turning point for all of us.
What are some of your plans for the future? Are there any upcoming projects in the works for either one of you?
JP: Colin’s going to go be a giant sitcom star now. Go on and talk about your new show with (producer, director, writer) Bill Lawrence.
CF: I’ve known Bill Lawrence for a while. He did Scrubs, Spin City and Cougar Town, and we just finished shooting a pilot last week called Like Father. It’s through, I guess, Warner Brothers for Fox, and we’ll find out in a month whether or not it’s going to go (to series). It was really fun to do. And Jaime, you’re doing Boston Corporate, yes?
JP: I’m involved in that project, which we’ve set up over at Universal, and I also have some other projects in development with some other producers and companies. So we’ll see which one goes first. This part of the process is a little bit of a waiting game. It’s interesting in that this is actually the first time in a long time that I’ve been free to pursue other things. When you count the split seasons for three and four, it will be seven years that Eureka has been on the air. Prior to that there were two years of development, so it was something that pretty much took over my life. So I think it will be fun to try to create something new and maybe in a different capacity. So I’m keeping a number of options open.
As noted above, photo by Justin Stephens and copyright of Syfy, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!
