DELIRIUM: Rodrigo Garcia on Bringing the Pilot to WIGS, If It Could Continue, and More

In 2013, Fox passed on the pilot for DELIRIUM, based on the popular Lauren Oliver book trilogy, and as with most passed over pilots, the potential series went (seemingly) quietly into the night.

Enter: WIGS.

WIGS —  an online studio started by Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia as a YouTube original programming channel that quickly expanded into partnerships with Fox, as well as distribution on Hulu and other platforms — has been putting out female-led programming since its launch in 2012, and since co-founder Garcia also directed the DELIRIUM pilot, putting the two things together ended up being a natural fit.

To get a little more insight about what bringing DELIRIUM to WIGS means — AKA, could it continue on? Might other pilots get this same second life? — I spoke with Garcia about the show’s journey, and what’s next for WIGS…

What can you share about the journey of acquiring DELIRIUM for WIGS?
Rodrigo Garcia: I directed the pilot, and I always thought the books were so good and the idea was so good. We were able to put together with Fox a cast of really lovely and talented and likable cast members. I always thought it was a shoo-in to become a series, and it didn’t. Things don’t become series for different reasons; it’s never one thing.

I always thought, “Why throw it away? Why don’t we play it? Why not on our own channel?” Our [programming] is about female characters and lives of women, and certainly this series circles around this character. [WIGS] is also teamed up with Fox, so we started pestering them: “We’d love to play this on our channel.”

It was a process. This thing with pilots that weren’t picked up for series getting played on the web is rare. But I think as time goes by, the web has become something where a lot of original things play on the web, quality things play on the web. A lot of the content on the web used to be mostly disposable. I think it’s becoming — you read in the trades every day that networks and channels, everyone wants to start doing original programming for the web. So it’s new now, but I think it’s going to be common that if something doesn’t find a home on one platform, it will find it in another.

Was there a particular reason to have a 24-day window for people to view the pilot, aside from making the biggest splash as possible out of the gate?
RG: I think everyone agreed it should be a window. The web can be endless; you can have it there forever and ever. But we wanted it to have obviously not a one-night run — like something runs the way it used to be on networks, people [now] expect things to be available for certain windows to watch at their leisure. Everyone was on board with giving it some time: not so much that the product would take some wear and tear, but enough that people could see it, see it again, and others who didn’t know about it would have time to discover it.

Did you make any changes to the pilot from what would have aired on Fox to make it more suitable for this WIGS run?
RG: No, we did not. There were small editorial changes…but it is very much that pilot that back then we — by we, I mean the Chernin company, myself, the people who produced it — [made.] We didn’t want to turn it to accommodate to match WIGS more than the basic thing that it already did, which was that it has a woman in the lead. Which is really all we do on WIGS — that is it. We don’t necessarily do comedy or drama or dramedy, we’re not interested in what she does for a living, how she dresses, what color she is. We’re looking for stories about women that are interesting, and there certainly is one: a girl in a world where love is feared and eradicated, and she falls in love. That certainly was WIGS enough for us.

One of the great things about WIGS is that when a series connects with an audience, you often do sequels, etc., to continue the story. Would that be possible with DELIRIUM? Or is this a one-time thing?
RG: Well, I don’t know. Obviously, like everything else in the world, it’s depending on if the audience is big, we would be tempted to do more, to find it again, to expand. We don’t rule out anything. But for now, we just want people to enjoy the pilot…it tells a lot about the characters in this world that they live in, and their predicament, and their dangers, and their passions. I think it’s enjoyable on its own.  Of course, if it did very, very well, I’m sure we’d consider things. But we don’t want to get ahead of our audience here.

Were you monitoring the burst of excitement that spread on social media when it was announced WIGS would be showing DELIRIUM?
RG: I’m not surprised, because even as we were shooting the pilot, the response was huge. People that follow the books, people that follow the writer, our cast, especially Emma [Roberts (Lena)] has a humongous amount — in the millions — of followers on Twitter and Instagram. So I’m not surprised that even a tweet from her made a big difference.

Now that the pilot is finally going to be out there, what are you most excited for people to see?
RG: There’s two levels: first of all, I’m excited for all the people who knew it was being made who are fans of the book, and fans of our cast, and obviously were disappointed it didn’t go anywhere. So first of all, I’m excited for them, because this is rare. Something like this to have a second life is unusual.

And then I hope people discover the world of these books and this pilot. The work of the actors is excellent. Jeanine [Mason (Hana)], Daren [Kagasoff (Alex)], Gregg [Sulkin (Julian)], and Emma, in particular, are very strong in it.

And I hope it will bring new eyes to WIGS, obviously. We wanted it to play in our WIGS home. We believe in it as something that can belong here. So hopefully it will be symbiotic.

Are you looking to pursue this with other pilots that might have been passed on? Or is this something you only anticipate doing this time because you were involved with DELIRIUM?
RG: My involvement is what first made us think of [putting DELIRIUM on WIGS], because among other things I didn’t want to see it go to waste as it were. But we will play things on WIGS that we feel are quality, deserve an audience, that have things in sync with our platform: anything that has interesting women and interesting situations. We would do it with other series, with movies, with other pilots, perhaps. This just happened to be a very good coincidence, not just because I’m at WIGS and directed it, but because we thought it was a good match.

That makes sense. What can you tease about what’s in store for WIGS in the foreseeable future?
RG: We’re developing several things; we don’t have a production date just yet, but we’re developing three or four more series. There’s always the possibility we’ll come back with new installments of things that have worked in the past like BLUE. Those are still in development. But we hope to develop three new dramatic series soon.

At this point, do you have a lot of people approaching WIGS pitching their own projects, or are you still seeking people out?
RG: We do both. Some people we sort of look for, but we have a lot of incoming interest. Some ideas work better in certain platforms, and people have ideas that they wrote up as a play, and it didn’t work as a play, or they wrote as a movie and it didn’t really work as a movie, but it would be perfect for WIGS. In fact, a lot of the offers we get, they call us and that’s the line: “I have something that would be perfect for WIGS, because it’s in the WIGS format: it’s about a woman, it’s contemporary, it’s complicated, and it could be told in short chapters or more long chapters.” But we get a lot of incoming. Our goal is to tell an interesting story with a woman in the lead. That is so much broader than a lot of channels or networks do. A lot have a lot more specific guidelines about what they would like to be. We’re fine if we like it, if we think the audience would like it, and if it has a woman in the center. That makes for attracting a lot of people with a variety of ideas.

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DELIRIUM is available to stream on Hulu now.

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