STALKER: Kevin Williamson Previews His New CBS Series
September 30, 2014 by Marisa Roffman
CBS is debuting its latest crime procedural, STALKER, on Wednesday night, and thanks to series creator Kevin Williamson (THE FOLLOWING, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, the SCREAM movies), the show starts off big…and more than a little terrifying.
To find out a little bit more about what’s in store, I spoke with Williamson about what the series will be tackling, the cases they’re going to handle, and more…
What can you say about the scope of the show?
Kevin Williamson: We do episodes where we explore — one of the things we’ve been asked to do is all different types of stalking. All the different types, all the different kinds of motivations. It’s all kinds of stalkings: it’s not just rejected love. There’s gang stalking, there’s all kinds of different stalking. There’s certainly different ways of stalking. And all the different storylines [that brings]. We’re just being very varied.
I imagine the research into this unit could be pretty terrifying. What have you learned that you’ve been able to utilize for the show?
KW: We have actually the head of TMU [Threat Management Unit], which is the real stalker unit [in Los Angeles], as a consultant. He tells us how these cases are broken down, how they’re investigated, and [he] brings a realism to our profiling the stalkers. [Workers from the real unit] go in, they check the level of threat, they assess the level of fear in the victim. And they can deduce a lot. There are so many different storylines we can go down. Look at [NBC’s] SVU — who would have thought they would have this many years of that show? There are so many ways to tell stories.
You’ve worked at a number of neworks over the years. What have you found has been uniquely CBS in your time in working on STALKER?
KW: They’re so committed to doing the cop show, a procedural, and they’re so supportive. I’ve been wanting to work with Les [Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer of CBS Corporation] and Nina [Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment] for so long. And then they came to me and said, “Do you have a cop show? Do you have a scary cop show?” And I went, “Oh, what about my old idea of STALKER?”
What is the balance between case of the week vs. personal so far in the series?
KW: The first year, we’re going to do 80-20. 80 percent case of the week, 20 percent the character storyline. It’s so you don’t get so serialized you lose an audience. There are cases of the week. It’s not meant to be a serialized show.
What particular cases are you excited for viewers to see?
KW: The Halloween episode is really cool, because it involves kind of a ghost stalking. It’s more about stalking a house, so to speak. And it’s really interesting, really reality based, and really creepy and scary for the people who live inside it.
And then there’s — oh, we’re doing an Uber episode! Well, an Uber-esque episode, so it’s ripped from the headlines. It’s easy to stalk someone with Uber. But it’s not Uber.
We’re doing an episode with gang stalking, we’re doing a Hollywood story.
Newscasters are [often] targets, because they stare into the camera every day, and you identify with them. We have a lot of stories.
How will social media play a role in the show?
KW: Honestly, there is an internet aspect to every stalking. It comes up a lot.
You mentioned during the TCA panel for the show that you had your own stalker, which partially inspired this. And during your time on THE FOLLOWING, Ryan’s heart problems echoed your own. Is there ever a concern about putting these vulnerable pieces of yourself into a project? Or does that help you in writing it?
KW: I put myself into everything, you just don’t always see it. So do all of my writers. I can point to every episode and say, “This is what happened to X.” All of the writers, that’s our voice; we write what we know. It keeps it interesting
It keeps it authentic.
KW: If you have to stay up all night long to make a deadline, it helps to make it worth it.
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STALKER airs Wednesdays at 10 PM on CBS.
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