The Point Radio: Getting POWERS On TV – Finally

The process of turning the Image Comics hit POWERS from book to TV wasn’t an easy one. Co-creator Brian Michael Bendis talks about all the bumps along the way, plus Susan Heyward and Eddie Izzard from the new Sony TV series share how they came on board. Plus Nestor Carbonell from BATES MOTEL talks about the path his character is on this season and what is really behind his relationship with Norma.

In a few days, we look at UNDATEABLE, headed back to NBC, and we head to the set with creator Bill Lawrence and comedian Ron Funches. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. Well, as with any overnight success, that was a pretty long road between comic book and TV series for Powers. And Brian Michael Benders and the cast are here to tell the tale on that.

Plus, Nestor Carbonell talks a little more about the new season of Bates Motel and what's the deal between his character and Norma? He finally lets it out. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point.

The Point Radio. Get The Point. It was all the way back in the year 2000 that Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Oeming created the series Powers for Image Comics. And the last decade and a half has been a long, hard road to get that comic produced

as now one of the regular television series. Brian Michael Bendis talks about what happened along the way. When we were just on our second issue, Sony optioned the book back in 2000. And Mike was actually drawing the book in a security booth in a parking garage that he was working at.

That's where he drew the first issues of Powers. So that money got him out of the parking garage. So that was great. But when they bought it, they didn't actually know what they had yet. You know, it was much darker than I think someone over in features thought it was.

And they were all hopped up on Spider-Man and it's not Spider-Man. So we had a really interesting time developing it as a feature. Frank Oz was a chapter director for a while and we had a wonderful time with him and David Ray was one of the writers. It was a wonderful experience but it clearly isn't a movie.

It is a TV show. It is an ongoing procedural. It is, you know, just the nature of the way we're telling the stories matches television more than it does film. And so when they were smart enough, David Engler, our executive producer,

was smart enough to go to Sony, you know, if you just move it over to television, you know, we could have a go at this for real and literally FX brought it like the next day. They were completely in. And they developed for us and we made a pilot and it was an interesting pilot. Interesting enough for them to put a writers room together.

But still there was someone off and it was a chemistry thing. Everyone involved was very talented but it just sometimes, you know, is something, you know, both in the writers room, Charlie Houston was hired to be in the writers room and he wrote an episode that was fantastic. It was just like unbelievable.

It was funny and it was dark and it was dangerous and I literally emailed the president of the network and I go, by the way, if you're looking to find powers, that's it. And so many other people agreed that they actually ended up finding everybody else except for Charlie. And Charlie was now running the show. And it was his version that got us where we are here.

For actor Eddie Yizzard, it was a letter that got him involved in the show. It was an unusual letter. I showed it to my producer, but it's very unusual. And it's about the dark, sort of poetic vision of the darkness and the beauty behind the wolf. So that intrigued me as an opening gambit.

I sort of loved it and think, I've got to do that to pitch that to someone. It was just an unusual weapon because he's not, the wolf comes in and drip feed into our season and he's only in for one scene in the first episode. He's not in the second episode. He comes in the third and gradually he's going to get more and more involved.

So he couldn't really show me the huge, much more than that. So it was based on Charlie. It's interesting. On comic books, I am not someone who's read all the comic books. And I really should be the person.

I think it's my dyslexia that makes me, I wait until the films come out. This took a little bit of audio to pull Susan Hayward into the project. I love the script. It was a complete world when I read the pilot. The way Charlie wrote it, he has very specific songs that are underlying certain scenes.

And when I was reading it for the first time, I just pulled out my laptop and looked up the songs on YouTube and played them while I read them. And the whole world is kind of moved, I felt like, in front of me. And I just felt like, I get the rules here. I get what people are going for.

I get their need. There was a sense of real strong need from every character, which is exciting because when those needs are at cost purposes, there's a chance for real, deep conflict and not like, fupu conflict. Oh, is she going to have sex with him or her? Because he's going to have sex and the girls will be all of it.

That's not interesting to me. So it's like deep, deep need from all the characters, a world that isn't always glamorous. You know, we've got this really great metaphor for the superpowers as huge celebrities. And they have endorsement deals, and they've got money, and they've got fans. But it's not always shiny and glittery.

So being able to peek underneath that and not even just peek underneath it, I need to go to the exact opposite of the human depravity of the homicide detective. So I see people at their work. So for the part of the world that's not been familiar with the comic, what actually is powers? Is it a cop show or is it a superhero show?

Brian Bendis comments. It's not a Dead Superhero of the Week show. That would get crazy old-fashioned. And that one's case would then illuminate other things about other parts of things. And so, though we are different and have a different energy, for those looking for that, what is it like,

it's closer to that than it is long-order. And that kind of long-form storytelling allows complexity, allows character moments for all of them. You're going to see Dina go from something to something, and this is Wolf go from something to something, and that's the good stuff. Powers, the TV series is available exclusively on the PlayStation Network.

You can get more information right now on your PlayStation console or go to PlayStation.com. Too quiet, look what's going on right now in the world of pop culture. There's a lot of old and something new again, and it is what everybody's going to be talking about over the weekend and into the next couple of weeks. DC has leaked a couple images that show new costumes for some of their core characters

that will debut in the titles that will premiere after Convergence. There's a new costume for Superman that throws back a little bit to the Golden Age and at the beginning of New 52 as well, and a new one for Wonder Woman as well. Look for more new costumes to be revealed over the next couple of weeks, and again, they all do debut in DC titles after Convergence,

which means it will be the ones that will be in comic stores in June. MSNBC is now partnering with Facebook to produce two new daily videos that will appear on Facebook each and every day. The first one is called Sound Off, focusing on breaking news and will be available every morning. Face Palm appears at the end of the day with more events that have covered the news over the past 24-hour cycle. The videos will appear on NBC and on the now-this Facebook pages.

When Fox airs the Emmy broadcast coming in September, they're going to put it in the hands of one of their own. Andy Samberg from Brooklyn Nine-Nine has been named as the host of the broadcast. It will air on Fox on Sunday, September 20th. Sci-Fi has renewed 12 Monkeys for a second season on the network. Viewership has been up since the show debuted a few months back, with an average of about 1.5 million viewers total.

When everything's all added together. In the meantime, on CBS, there are also some renewals. Both Mom, Mike and Molly, and two broke girls too, by the way, all renewed for the 2015-2016 TV season. Verizon has signed a multi-year deal with Awesomeness TV, adding some 200 hours of original content through the year. It will be available only in the US sometime later this year, and among the content will be DreamWorks TV featuring live action and animated short-form content.

The end is coming, at least the season end, for a couple of your favorite series over on The CW. Arrow will air their final episode of the season on Wednesday, May 13th, and a week later, The Flash's first season comes to an end on Tuesday, May 19th. Don't think that this week's release of the new live action Cinderella is the end of Disney's live action reboot of some of their classic films. A new one is announced that it has a couple of people a little concerned, and is a reboot of Dumbo.

And attached to it will be Tim Burton. No announcement yet about a plan to get that in theaters, but more than likely it'll be sometime in 2017. Reid Pop, the people behind C2E2 in Chicago and the New York Comic Con, are expanding their venue into China. The Shanghai Comic Convention will take place from Reid Pop on the 16th and 17th of May. It'll be at the Shanghai Convention Center on those dates.

That'll be the first such event ever to be held in the world's largest country. Actor Nestor Carbonell is back for another season of Bates Motel. So right up front, I was curious as to his comments on how his character has grown over the past couple of seasons. That's a great question, Mike. He's, you know, first we meet Romero and he's just sort of a tough ornery character.

He's very prickly and not very likable, you know, and really tough on the Bates family. But yeah, over the course of these three seasons, he has somehow come to warm to Norma Bates, and I think she softens him. This year, you'll see quite a bit of that as well, a lot of push-pull and definitely a growing attraction to her. And that really, I think that's sort of the beginning of his change. Oddly enough, she's the one who affects probably the greatest change on him at that and the fact that the town is turning on him.

You will find out very quickly this season that with the implosion of the pod industry that's a stay in the town, he's sort of his, he's not very well-liked in town. He was meant to keep the peace. So that definitely is going to change Romero, but certainly Norma Bates is softening him this year, and that's been a lot of fun to play. I've heard that this year there are a couple of episodes that give us a little bit more about the man behind the badge.

Anything you could tell us on that? Well, they're talking about specifically an episode that we shot. It was episode seven, so it's a little deeper into the season. But yeah, that particular episode, we get a little bit of his backstory about sort of what makes him tick, a little bit of his childhood. And that's going to inform a little bit of what the guy is.

He doesn't smile much. He doesn't suffer fools. He's a bit of a curmudgeon. But he has his own code, and we get an insight into how all of that sort of made perhaps a candidate be. And it was a surprise to me.

I didn't know what my backstory was going to be until I got the script, but I was pleasantly surprised it was great. Big question, though, is the relationship between Norma Bates, played by Vera Farmiga, and Nestor's character. Let's get down to it. What is the attraction there? Great question.

I think they're in a strange way. They're very similar. They're both control freaks, Norma and Sarah Romero. And they kind of both go by the beat of their own drum. And Norma is very quick to basically step up against anyone who comes between her and her family, and she's extremely protective, as is Romero, of people that he cares for.

So I think he admires her. I think he sees her as his female counterpart. So I think there's that element of it. She's also, obviously, a charming woman, a beautiful woman. But there is an element of sympathy, too, as she's been through a lot.

I think she tugs at his heart in that way as well. But I don't think he pities her. I think he finds her as a formidable foe in a weird way. So I think that's part of why he's drawn to her. And some of it is just inexplicable.

You know, I think sometimes, you know, when you fall for the woman, you go, what? Why? And you just don't know why. But there's a sort of this chemistry. And so let's do perhaps her destined to be together.

We're going to find out hopefully this year. Mr. Slack's big TV role was lost, a show that, well, shall we say, left us with a number of questions that to this day are still unanswered. On Bates, though, the characters are headed toward what we know is a very definite ending. And I ask him if, as an actor, does he play that any differently? Well, yeah, you're absolutely right.

I mean, it's different in the sense that, you know, we have a sense of what the end is or what we think the end will be on our show here. But, you know, there's a lot of similarities in the way we're working here as we did on Austin. We don't really get a heads up on what storylines are going to be on loss. We certainly never knew. I didn't know my backstory until it was, you know, I got the script the week before I started shooting it, which happened on lost as well.

So we I'm enjoying that level of mystery like I did on lost. But but no, I think, you know, these five seasons are very carefully mapped out in a Carrie and then Carlton's mind. And, you know, even though when lost, they know they knew where they wanted to end. I think there was more. There was more give and more play within each season than there was necessarily on this one. And here we're only doing 10 episodes a season as well.

So it's a lot easier, I guess, to control the story, you know, any arcs. But but no, it's it's you know, it's a psychological thriller. So so we are not we're kept in the dark about all the twists and turns that are coming because those are the secrets and like it was on lost as well. And it's similar also in the sense that it was, you know, lost is very much a character driven show. It was every episode was devoted to somebody's backstory or, you know, or flash sideways.

And this show is absolutely all of that. It's very much in this season in particular, all about character development and and the plot coming through the character, as opposed to just a plot driven show. So with an acting resume like Nesters, I had to know were there any good parts that got away? Anything that he passed on that? Well, now he regrets just a little bit. It's really funny. I just mentioned that because I was just talking about this with with with Freddie, with Freddie.

I'm work and my wife were driving past Paramount and saying, you guys are so close to Paramount. Have you ever worked there? And my wife and I looked at each other. And I wasn't offered the show, but I was offered a screen test for for the the Julie McMan roll and Nip Tuck. And it was at a time it was written as a Cuban plastic surgeon. And it was I was debating on whether and I loved the script, but I was at the beginning of pilot season and it was a few other pilots coming down the pike that I had my eye on.

And I ultimately ended up not screaming. I met with him, but I didn't end up taking the screen test. And sure enough, that show was was a fantastic hit and a monster hit. And the show ended up taking only one nine episodes. So we often think about that show.

But but now had I done that show up, probably I wouldn't have gotten a loss. So I always had no regrets. But but yeah, that one that was definitely what we still talk about. Mr. Carbonell in the new season of Bates Motel. Catch up right now at AETV dot com and new episodes air every Monday on A&E.

That's it for right now. But in the meantime, undateable, the little comedy that could is back on NBC. And we celebrate in a couple of days with comedian Ron Funches and creator Bill Lawrence. All that exclusively on websites like ComicMix dot com. Michael Davis World dot com.

Get the point radio dot com and the iTunes podcast directory as well. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook under the point radio and then be right back here in a few days. Get the point radio dot com.