Moonlight

It has been three years since Angel went off the air and four since Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Avid followers of the cult vampire shows have been sorely missing the genre ever since.  Now comes a potential heir-apparent to Buffy and Angel in the form of CBS' debuting vampire show, Moonlight.

Joel Silver, the man behind some of the biggest blockbusters in the last two decades, including the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Matrix franchises, is currently at the helm of the upcoming new series.  Silver is no stranger to producing for television or the vampire genre.  Silver served as executive producer on shows like Tales from the Crypt and Veronica Mars.  He came up close and personal with the horror format during his years with Tales from the Crypt, even producing its big screen offshoots like the vampire-centric Bordello of Blood.

Silver spoke to CanMag last month about Moonlight.

“It's not going to be a violent show at all,” Silver explained.  “It's light.  It's fun.  It has some dark edges but it's really fun.  There will be a lot of action in it but it's not grotesque.  It's a really warm, sweet, funny vampire show.”

Silver went on to admit that he embarked on the project without the usual pilot episode and was forced to develop the program as he went along.  Armed only with a concept he believed in, the veteran filmmaker took the idea to the network.

“CBS wanted to only do a small presentation so we went into this with our eyes wide open, but we didn't know what we were doing at that time,” Moonlight's executive producer revealed.  “We were kind of figuring out where we were going.  When we got together and we decided that we wanted to do the show, we all sat down and said, ‘What would we do if we were going to do it as a series?'  We never really had a pilot per se, so we had to kind of think about what that pilot would be.  It just came about that we had a wonderful group of players.”

“That's just the magic of good producing,” Silver added.  “It was really we had a script that we had created and CBS went through with us and we kind of went through some scenes they wanted us to shoot and we just titled it together with great narration that I was able to pull off, and we made it feel as good as we could.  It felt good enough to get a nine o‘clock slot on TBS on Friday night but it was just a good idea.  But the studio felt and the network felt at that time that we needed to kind of have more of a sense of what the show was.  The presentation was just like a presentation.  It wasn't really a full blown developed kind of piece of a show.  It was like 26 minutes of stuff put together with a kind of packing tissue.  I think it set up what we were doing and I think it showed off Alex [O'Loughlin who plays Moonlight's lead character, Mick St. John].”

Moonlight premieres Friday, September 28.


-Rosario Santiago, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: CanMag
(Image Courtesy of NY Times)