When you sat down and said, “How do we make this a TV show?,” what were those early discussions like?
Schwartz: Well, first it was, Marvel television has a policy, which is no magic. They like to take a more grounded approach to the story, so things are driven through science, or technology, even if it’s technology from the future, but nothing that feels like completely impossible. So that was a fun challenge of taking some of these dynamics or some of these powers, certainly the parent powers, and try to put that through a more grounded lens.
And I will say, we wrote it on spec to prove to Marvel how much we loved it and how much we wanted to play in this world, and we wrote a bible to go with it, and our first episode was structurally closer to the comic: we opened with the Pride meeting, with the parents and kids showing up and very early on the kids witness the sacrifice, and when we landed at Hulu, they gave us the kind of note that we would never have gotten on broadcast but we were thrilled to get, which was, can we take this giant event that happens early in your story and push that to the end of the show, and open up that real estate to be able to really delve into these characters and understand who they were and who they are before they show up at the Pride meeting? And that led to a lot of interesting conversations just about backstory and their dynamics.
So Nico is not using magic, her mother isn’t, the Staff of One is not magical?
Savage: Well, don’t tell Nico that. It definitely is activated by blood. It can read your mind, if by reading your mind, it means translating electrical impulses from your brain. But Tina tells us that it was engineered in the wizard laboratory and powered by some very special unique technology.
Schwartz: Yes. It may not be from this world
