A murder mystery where the victim is still alive? It might sound odd, but it’s that exact kookiness and supernatural flare that drew showrunner Aaron B. Koontz onto the new Syfy series, ‘Revival.’ Based on a best-selling comic series of the same name, the show follows the town of Wasau, Wisconsin, where everyone who dies on Jan. 1 resurrects the next day, sending the town and its inhabitants into a frenzy.
To dive deeper into the story, Koontz sat down with Metro to discuss how they brought this comic series to life onscreen.
I saw you got involved with this project through working with Luke Boyce. What were those early conversations like and what pulled you in to this project?
[Luke and I] worked together on a small film called ‘Revealer’ and really vibed. We got along and he said, ‘Look, I’ve got this passion project. I’ve got the rights to this crazy comic that was very popular, it was a New York Times bestseller.’ It was a big deal, but he couldn’t get it off the ground. And he’s like, ‘I need your help—I need a producer. I need someone who can help me figure out what to do.’ He was really pushing it as a movie at the time, and I said, ‘Okay, yeah, I’ll take a look.’
I knew Tim Seeley’s work, I hadn’t read ‘Revival’ yet, but I had read ‘Hack/Slash’. Then the first issue completely hooked me. I said, ‘Oh my God, this is the pilot?’ I wanted to know more about these characters, there was such a world. It felt a little like ‘Fargo’ with a murder mystery. Then obviously, the supernatural elements [pulled me in.] I’m a genre guy through and through, so this was checking all the boxes. I asked, ‘Have you thought about doing this for TV?’ This world can expand. Let’s do this, let’s really push this for TV because I think this could be a really creatively fulfilling journey.
You made the move from producing to showrunning on this as well?
As I kept reading more issues, I really wanted to make this thing. I’ve been looking for a project to shift a lot of my producing duties onto, and you’re still producing as a showrunner, but I really wanted to get into a more creative realm. And this became it. Luke and I have been dear, dear friends, and pitched to a bunch of places. I had an existing relationship with Syfy and NBC, I had made a film there years ago and knew a few of the executives. We had other conversations with other places, but they immediately took to it. They were already familiar with the material and ordered the pilot.
With 47 comics to go through, how did you pull themes, characters and moments from the original series while still making it your own?
It was hard because in the comic world, you don’t really know how things are going to go. Well, I guess in all worlds you don’t really know how they’re going to go—but in comics in particular, if it starts to sell well, they’re like, okay, order new comics now…and you just have to push the story. So they had a beginning and an ending and a through line, but then it was like, oh, let’s go crazy with this. A lot of pretty insane things happened in the comic.
But what I fell in love with at the beginning was the Cypress family, the relationships—and that’s what TV’s about. TV is about characters. It’s a cliche, but it’s so true. So how do we center this on the Cypress family? Luke was all about it, and then even Tim Seeley, the creator of the comic was like, yeah, that’s really what the heart of this was. We actually veered off into some weird territories a couple of times, I mean there’s an Amish ninja in the comic, but he knew there was something there.
I wanted to pair this down to the murder mystery story, at least in Season 1, and then play with something that could expand and go in all these wild directions. But at the same time, stay quarantined stay in Wausau, Wisconsin where it takes place and focus on the rural noir, as Tim would call it. I wanted to do a supernatural ‘Mare of Easttown.’
So how do we really hone in on that? Luke is so close to the material in the comic. It was great because I was new to the comic, so it created a really nice dynamic. And no matter where you come from, whether you read the comic or not, you can find a way to hopefully stay engaged.
What characters and dynamics were fun to flesh out and see come to life?
It was interesting because there were obvious ones: Dana (Melanie Scrofano), Adam (Ibrahim Ramin), and then Wayne (David James Elliott), we wanted to make him a bigger character. The mother who’s passed away in the comic, we don’t really go into, but she becomes a bigger part of the fracturing of the Cypress family as you move on through the future episodes. But it was also finding these characters that we could pair and then contrast.
I think a good example of this would be Blaine (Steven Ogg). So Blaine Abel in the comic was a tow truck repairman exorcist, Limp Bizkit fan. Super weird, crazy ‘Fargo’-esque character that we loved. But then as we kept going in, we had these different ideas. It’s called ‘Revival’, so we ended up taking this weird kind of fire and brimstone preacher guy. We took the idiosyncratic tendencies of Blaine Abel in the comic, and we merged them into this new character and in a different direction to create an interesting antagonistic kind of duality between the regular people in the comics and what’s happening there.
The town itself is almost a character on its own as well. What went into creating that aspect of the show?
A lot of that comes from Tim and his hometown, it’s where it’s set. A lot of these stories were weird things that actually happened in the town. There was a mystery where somebody killed a Zorse and the cops were trying to figure this out—Tim put that in the comic. We couldn’t find a Zorse, so we made it a horse in the show. It’s an odd Midwestern town that has a lot of prideful people proud of where they come from.
There were a lot of times we would almost change a character and then Luke would be like, ‘No, no, no, wait, that’s Tim’s aunt.’ So then we would bring them back in or rework it. Tim came in the writer’s room and Mike Norton who was the artist on it as well, he came in the writer’s room and talked with us on different stories about why this and why that. He also gave us the specific sense of Wausau to lean into, which was a lot of fun.
‘Revival‘ will premiere Thursday, June 12, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on SYFY. Episodes will be available on Peacock one week after they air.
