LEVERAGE: Dean Devlin Teases the Midseason Premiere

LEVERAGE is back!

After a nearly three month “break” between the season, Nate, Sophie and the whole gang is back to their old tricks for eight more episodes of hijinks. (Trust me when I say the show hasn’t missed a beat. The first two episodes are excellent.)

To celebrate the occasion, I chatted with LEVERAGE executive producer Dean Devlin about what fans can expect from the season 4.5 premiere…

What can you tease about LEVERAGE’s midseason premiere?
Dean Devlin: Only that it’s a little bit more intense, it’s a little darker than we normally do for midseason openers. But that’s followed by a show that’s lighter than what we normally do. It’s one of the things we’re most proud about with LEVERAGE — that this can live in an intense world, but can also live in a fun, light world. The world of LEVERAGE is broader than most shows and it’s something we’re very proud about.

The midseason finale wasn’t incredibly dark, but it did touch on some of the show’s more long-running issues with the return of Sterling. Was there ever any conversation about whether you’d touch on that plot for the opener or did you guys just want a “fresh” start, so to speak?
DD: Well, you know, we normally design the season as one big giant season and then it’s up to TNT where they want to break it apart. And once we know where they’re going to break it, we try and make the summer finale feel like a real finale. So we work backwards in that regards. But really, the two halves are parts of a whole, so we really look at it as one season. And as you’ll see as these episodes progress, it really does lead to this two-part season finale. Each thing is a little step up that ladder. And [the midseason premiere] reminds people of the background of Eliot. This gives a little window on his past. And it also shows how the Parker and Hardison relationship is developing.

Speaking of that Parker and Hardison romance, we’ve been getting brief moments of their relationship so far. Do you anticipate a time where you’ll shine more of a light on them or will it continue to be these little glimpses?
DD: I think the interesting part is these two people clearly care about each other deeply. But they’re scarred and damaged people. They have a love affair in a minefield and they have to walk very gingerly and very carefully. And I think that’s what makes the journey so compelling. Because you know what they want to do and you know how difficult it is for them to do it.

And at the same time, we’re paralleling the love story of Nate and Sophie. And someone said to me a long time ago, that the difference between young love and mature love is that young love is about passion and mature love is about compromise. And to a very real degree, that’s what’s happening on our show. We’ve got Parker and Hardison, who clearly have a passion for one another, but they have all these other obstacles in front of them. And then you have these two fiercely independent people in Sophie and Nate, who have to learn to compromise in order to be together, and yet both of them are uncompromising in their lives. And that’s what I think makes those journeys interesting to watch.

And as Hardison and Parker grow closer, it also seems that he is finding himself in more and more dangerous situations than in previous seasons. Was that an intentional move on the writers’ part?
DD: Our longer arc, our overall theme for the season — and it will culminate in the season finale — is this season has been all about consequences. They can’t continue to do the work they do without ultimately suffering some kind of consequences. So what we tried to do is have the characters become deeper and deeper in their involvement with what they’re doing. And Hardison, ultimately, wants to run his own crew. So he’s constantly trying to prove to Nate that he knows how to do this and he’s trying to learn from Nate, so he can run his own crew.

Unfortunately for him, he just seems to find himself running into situations where he needs the rest of the crew to bail him out. He has some more learning to do.
DD: [Laughs] At least a couple more seasons of learning.

Not time for the spinoff, yet. Give him until season 8 or 9 and then he can go off and do his own little crew.
DD: There you go!

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LEVERAGE returns Sunday, November 27 at 9 PM on TNT. Will you be tuning in?

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