Last Bite is back with news on the new shows that will be popping up on your TV in the 2013-2014 TV season (i.e. Dracula, Gothica, The Originals, The Selection, The Witches of East End and more…) and the latest news on upcoming movies (Star Wars, Blood Sisters and Divergent).

For SBLC, Maria reviews Warm Bodies the book and Kelly gives us a major hint on who Sookie may pick at the end of the Sookie Stackhouse series.

Plus, you’ll hear the latest news and spoilers on your favorite shows!

You can download the podcast here, via iTunes or via the Zune Marketplace.

Enjoy!

This podcast was recorded on 02.15.2013.

If you are a fan of Syfy’s Being Human, like I am, than you are on pins and needles about the upcoming premiere on January 14^th.  I was lucky enough to get on a press call for Being Human’s Anna Fricke and Sam Witwer and I’ve written up my notes for your perusal.

There are quite a bit of spoilers, so please tread lightly…

First up, the following is the official blurb from Syfy regarding the upcoming season of Being Human:

The new season of Being Human picks up 15 months after the events of last season’s riveting finale which ended with Aidan buried alive as punishment from vampire leader Mother, Sally lost in a state of limbo, and Josh’s plot to kill Ray, his werewolf “maker,” endangering Nora instead.  Season 3 features new and returning guest stars including Mark Pellegrino, Amy Aquino, Xander Berkeley, Bobby Campo and Kyle Schmid.

Everything on the show becomes upended and everyone almost becomes human. Will fans be upset with it?

SW: No, it was fantastic. You want to show to evolve. This is definitely the season of the characters that will allow you to know the characters.

AF: With great pain, comes great humor. But being human does not work out for these characters, if it does work out than the show ends.

Will Aiden go after Mother and be a better friend after Suren’s death?

SW: Yes. Aiden and Suren’s relationship was destructive and he comes out of it being mindful of what he has done to his roommates.

AF: Gong after Mother was something that Aiden initially wanted to do once he went into the ground, but things have changed now that he is out of the grave.

Is there a possibility of Aiden and Sally becoming more than just friends?

SW: Sally and Aiden have been roommates for a while and because of something that happens they interact in an unexpected way. And it is the first time they ever considered it as a possibility and we will see a lot of strange and funny scenes between Aiden and Sally in the third season.

AF: The writers are very careful about the relationships between the characters because you want to be protective of these relationships that the characters have.

We learn that there is a plague killing off vampires, will Aiden have a dilemma with saving the vampires?

SW: This is a huge conflict, because even if you hate a certain group, you do not necessarily want them to be wiped off the face of the earth. Hence his feelings of loyalty are challenged and we see him make decisions that are questionable.

Will Bishop be back like the character came back in the British version?

AF: Mark Pellegrino as Bishop will live on in flashbacks.

SW: I have pressured AF on bringing Mark Pellegrino back, but Anna has exercised restraint because she wants something logical to come of his re-appearance.

Regarding Aiden in the first episode:

SW: Aiden comes out of the grave quickly and is not in the 1^st episode that much and he is not like he was last season and he definitely has changed.

AF: The nature of everyone’s humanity is peeled back like an onion and as a result it is a very complicated season.

SW: The things that happen to the characters are very thematically consistent and by the end of the season it is like a freight train as the season builds its momentum.

Nora is officially a regular on the show and her storyline has its own course and it adds to the show.

SW: This is the 1^st time he has had a chance to develop a character over the course of 3 years. So, making these discoveries for these characters is very subtle and very challenging because you are working within these established characters. So, when we do flashbacks you see how different Aiden is from the Aiden that you’ve come to know. He’s thankful for it not being so easy, because it has enabled him to grow as an actor.

Regarding the titles of the episodes:

AF: It is a group effort to come up with the titles for the episodes.

Which is more fun, fun and crazy Aiden or the morose one?

SW: Prefers the fun crazy Aiden over the down-trodden and depressed Aiden, but that is because he started out being interested in comedy, but his career has not panned out that way.

Is there an intentional overlap between the U.S. and British versions of Being Human?

SW/AF: No. Everyone tries not to watch it, but at times a character may mirror another.

Amy Aquino will be on the show and will be playing a witch; can you divulge anything more about that?

AF: Amy Aquino is on the show as a witch and she is a lovely person so we lucked out. Her character goes deeper and she is a complicated woman with an interesting past and she is tongue in cheek and no nonsense. Very powerful and brings out a lot of power in sally.

SW: Amy understood from the get go what to do with her character. Amy humanized the character.

How would you describe this season?

SW: This season is a game changer.

AF: This season is a character season and all these characters come to a crossroads and these actors have reached their A-games.

SW: I’d like everyone to think of this season as satisfying.

SW: We have tried to make this show better every year.

AF: We are trying to cover all of our bases.

What was it like to start this season 15 months after the end of last season?

AF: Picking up the show 15 months later after last season was very freeing because there was more room to play with what happened to these characters.

What will happen with the witch digging up Sally?

SW: The witch digs up sally’s body up and there will be consequences for these actions.

How can you describe Aiden once he is out of the grave?

SW: Aiden is no longer the smooth character that you met in season 1 and he is not as socially adept as he has been in past.

SW: Is not convinced that Aiden will have a happy ending, but he does a couple of things that border on being heroic this season. We see why he did what he did last season and the fallout for it. His blood addiction, at times this season, forces him to act like a traumatized war vet trying to get back into society.

AF: Last year was a war for Aiden, so this season he is a PTSD and his view on society is different.

SW: The flashbacks that we do this season are ambitious and work with the storyline. They allow us to explore Aiden’s issues. Let’s look back at the murder of the two girls, Aiden is doing it without thinking and stands there confused and that is because of the training he has done to becoming a vampire killing machine and that does not allow him to turn it off.

Do the showrunner and writers have a 5 year plan for the show?

AF: We do not have 5 year plan, as we are going through the season we have a side board of the other storylines that we would like to show and they are the threads for season 4. We take season by season and live in an optimistic world and take it as it comes.

Do the actors have the ability to submit any input on storylines?

SW: The writers are very generous with taking input form the actors, but the understanding is that we convey their stories on screen but we suggest little things that the writers miss. AF: If it does not make sense or resonate with the actor and therefore we have to change the storyline after discussing with them how it can be something that the actors can connect with.

SW: You have 4 actors that know the show, characters and tone of the show and we are a well of information that the writers can use and this way it is a collaborative ship (environment) that AF steers. AF: Just remember, people die easily on supernatural shows.

SW: That was a threat.

Where is Aiden mentally in the beginning of the season?

SW: The death of Suren, being put in a prison and the lack of connection to his friends, lack of food makes Aiden desperate this season.

Where will these characters meet up in the third season?

AF: The hospital is still very in play and it is a symbolic place of work. It was for penance and as a blood supply.

Regarding Aiden’s addiction:

SW: Aiden has gone the Trainspotting style of dry-out and as a result he does not need that much blood to get by, but if he drinks too much he gets drunk faster.

What about Josh being human and his dynamic with the rest of the group?

SW: Josh is no longer a werewolf and because of that there is tension between him and Aiden.

AF: Josh is more aware of the change and now there is an interesting dynamic because he is trying to maintain his relationship with everyone.

SW: Josh comes in to his own this season. He becomes a man.

AF: There is definitely an emotional journey with Josh.

Would there be a one-off or web series on Aiden’s past?

SW: Regarding the flashbacks, there are 4 episodes that cover one flashback. If you line up all of Aiden’s flashbacks it all makes sense and you see an interesting progression. He would love to do a web series with Mark Pellegrino that centers on Aiden and Bishop would be amazing.

Would Sam like to write for Being Human?

SW: Has written and has something in development, but he does not think he can write for the show because the voice and tone of the show has been set by the writers of the show. He is very hesitant about doing so, but is interested in learning.

What is your favorite thing or episode of this season?

AF: This is a great season because of the roommate cross-overs.

SW: A scene between Aiden and Sally because she sexually harassed him throughout the episode.

I hope you enjoyed as much as I did!!!

~M.

I’m guessing that when he fed on Josh… it may have not been a good thing or he just went on a bender and this is what we are seeing.

Either way, Aidan does not look well at all.

What do you think?

Sam Witwer at the Syfy 2012 Upfront event at the American Museum of Natural History on April 24, 2012 in NYC (photo credit:  Getty Images)

(Zap2It)  We got a chance to chat with “Being Human” star Sam Witwer who plays Aidan the vampire. Aidan has been super-dark this season, what, with the neck-breaking and blood-sucking, but we just can’t get enough of him! Witwer gives us a preview of the next episode, talks about his cast mates and what’s coming in Season 3.

Witwer tells us about how the season is going to end, in terms of the relationships between the roommates. “They’re going to come together and then they’ll fracture a lot more,” he says. In the next episode … it’s almost entirely me and Sally (Meaghan Rath) and Josh (Sam Huntington). You do see the fracture growing bigger. And one of the themes of the third season will be getting the band back together.”

Witwer says he still worries that people will think Aidan has gone too dark. “I still think people might feel like that. If they have a hostility towards Aidan, I mean, who can blame them? The guy is making some poor choices. He’s in a difficult situation. But the thing to remember about this guy is that he was a bastard most of his life. So it’s very easy for him to slip back into that behavior when all of the people around him are influencing him to be that way.”

He gave us a sneak peek at the upcoming episode, saying, “There is a big, ‘we have to save this family’ moment. It’s quite good. I’m very, very happy with it. Basically, if they don’t work together, everyone is going to die,” he laughs. “It was certainly a hell of a lot of fun to shoot because me and Sammy and Meaghan haven’t seen each other as much this season. We got to shoot together every day.” He says they’ve had great chemistry since the first screen test, when they were asked to tone down the chemistry. They’ve even gone to Hawaii on vacation together once shooting wrapped.

So, we showed the video of Sam Witser (Syfy’s Being Human) speak of how he was to be involved with the second season of The Walking Dead… but that all changed when Frank Darabont was kicked to the curb. Well, here is Frank’s letter about the storyline that Sam Witwer spoke of:

From AICN

Dear Eric,

Sure, I’ll confirm that storyline. Why not? Big caveat here though:

CraveOnline is much mistaken in saying this was for a “web series.” This was never meant as a web gimmick, this was intended for use in the actual TV series. I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls. 



The idea was to do this with a very focused “you are there” documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We’d start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they’ve been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It’s not a special mission, it’s basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from “the city is being secured” to “holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.” Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc. (Yes, this approach owes a spiritual debt to a number of great films, including Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort.)

Along the way, I thought we could briefly dovetail this story with a few established characters from the show. Not to overdo that, mind you, because it could get silly and too coincidental if you load too much into that idea. But I thought it would be great to veer off on a quick narrative detour that brushes our soldiers briefly up against some people we know. Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it’s a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment. This would have been perhaps a minute or two of the episode, just a cool detour like the various outposts the soldiers encounter in Saving Private Ryan, but we would have witnessed the moment that Dale meets Andrea and Amy, seen where that relationship began. I also felt it would be a great way to get Emma Bell back into the series for a moment, because she was so wonderful and we were all so sorry that her character died and she had to leave the show. (Of course if this “brush with established characters” idea didn’t work in the script stage, I’d have tossed it out. You try a lot of ideas like that as you go, see how they play. But I thought this one stood a pretty good chance of being engineered to work well.) 



So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam’s soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they’ve been trying to get to from the start: it’s the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he’s been bitten. He’s accomplished his “simple” mission, but he’s gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he’s dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin…but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies. 



The kicker comes in the last moments of this episode:



After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death…and after a quiet lapse of time…we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde…blows that zombie soldier’s brains out…now Rick’s trapped…fade out…the end.



The notion was to take the “throwaway” tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story, every undead extra was once a human being with a life of his/her own…was, in a sense, the star of his own life’s movie. And we’ve followed this one particular guy and seen how his life ended; we witness his struggles, see his good intentions and his failures, and we experience his godawful death in this tank. That’s why I cast Sam as that tank zombie in the first place instead of just casting some extra. I had this story in mind while filming the pilot, and I knew I’d need a superb actor to play that soldier when the time came.



And then starting with Episode 202, we’d be back with Rick’s group and back in step with the flow of the established story from last season.

I always had in mind to throw in a “wild-card” episode every season, maybe as a season opener or closer. Just a separate story more in the feel of an anthology series, one that appears completely off the track of the regular series but actually does wind up tying in somehow by the fade-out. They did that sort of thing on LOST on occasion, and I really respected it. It always seemed like a bold choice that trusted the audience and rewarded their loyalty with a totally unexpected surprise episode every so often.

That’s it from me. I hope things are well on your end.

Best,

Frank

Here’s an excerpt of ASSIGNMENT X‘S exclusive interview with Sam Witwer where he revealed the early scoop on BEING HUMAN Season 2.:

So now you’re the leader of the vampires …

Whether he likes it or not, Aidan’s in charge of trying to straighten out a bunch of homeless junkies I guess. We start out [Season 2] about a month later in the middle of that kind of crisis and on top of the fact we don’t know what’s going on with Nora [Kristen Hager] and the result of her situation. There are a lot of cool things that we jump right into.

One of the criticisms early on with the show was how closely to stayed to the original BBC series, but as the season went on, it slowly found its own voice and direction.

It was always the plan to start very similar and diverge as we went on. The other actors and I didn’t watch the British series, because we didn’t want that to unintentionally affect our performance. After we established all this, I’ve now seen the entire BBC series and I’m a huge, huge fan of what they do. By that same token, our writers have not seen the second season, we couldn’t follow what they did if we tried. Of course there will be overlap. There are inevitable conclusions we arrive that are going to be similar, but they have not seen it and it will be totally different.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is one of the best sci-fi TV series ever made. Let me take “sci-fi” away – it’s one of the best TV series ever made. Everyone sort of agrees on that. No one really talks about it anymore how everyone hated it when it first came out. “Oh, Starbucks is a girl, how dare they. Boomer is supposed to be this black chick?” So, you know I remember that. I joined the cast of BATTLESTAR the first season and I was very frustrated with how finicky fans were. I prepared our entire cast on BEING HUMAN. “Look, we’re going to get crapped on. Fans of the British series are all sharpening their fangs. They’re ready to go. They’re going to kill us.” And they were. As soon as we started airing though, they backed off. That backlash never happened. I was shocked. I didn’t know what to think about it. “Thank you for giving us a shot and thank you for being so great” – that’s what I would like to say to them. The BBC series is wonderful, I’ve now seen the whole thing and I’m a huge fan of it. They were correct to be concerned, but I’m happy they gave us a chance.

For most of Season 1, Aidan was a loner, but now he’s become a leader – how is it shifting your character into this more dominant role?

It’s interesting because I assumed something was going to happen to these poor people Bishop was recruiting, but I didn’t know if I had any specific ideas where that was going. Now I have a whole bunch of them, as fed by the British series and seeing what they did. What’s the most fun is we’re going to be blazing our own trail. We couldn’t follow what we did if we wanted. Our writers have some heresy knowledge, but they haven’t seen that season and they have every intention of seeing it after we do ours.

Any scoops on Josh and Nora?

There’s going to be some crazy stuff with Josh and Nora. We have her [Kristen Hager] for a good amount of time. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything. And if you’re ever doing a flashback with Aidan, Mark Pellegrino can’t be that far away.

The entire cast grew extremely close throughout the shooting of the season. We went to Hawaii together. Myself, Sarah Allen, Sammy and Meaghan and Mark. We all got together and really bonded in a big way. It’s great to see everyone. We got our entire crew back, we got more writers, a slightly better budget and it’s going to be really exciting.”

To read the interview in its entirety, visit ASSIGNMENT X.