PRODIGAL SON Bosses on Adding Meagan Good and Sean Pertwee

As PRODIGAL SON prepares to sign off for the calendar year (the fall finale airs on Monday, December 2), two guest stars will shake things up for Bright (Tom Payne) and company.

Meagan Good’s Colette Swanson popped up briefly a couple of episodes ago, as the FBI agent who is now in charge of the Junkyard Killer case—and who has a history with Bright.

“We were just so excited about the opportunity to work with Meagan Good,” co-creator Chris Fedak says. “We really want to build out the FBI part of the story and also kind of get a glimpse of Bright’s backstory and what it was like when he was an FBI agent.”

“She represents very much the opposite of Bright,” he continues. “She comes at things from a much less sympathetic perspective to serial killers. One of the crazy things about our show is that Bright can sometimes empathize and sympathize and understand how serial killers think; [Colette] catches the bad guys. She’s a go-getter and we love that kind of action movie thing that she brings to the show. So it’s refreshing and different. We like to have a strong female voice coming at the profiling profession. She brings something special to the show.”

But taking lead on the case naturally puts her at odds with Malcolm’s new team.

“What’s nice is that off of Gil’s lead, it feels like the team—Dani and JT—really let Bright have a long leash,” admits co-creator Sam Sklaver. “You put up with a lot of his idiosyncrasies because he’s right and because he’s good—so you kind of let his backstory and his quirks pass. And Meagan’s character just has no time for the bulls—t. That’s been fun for us to show to show what it was like for Bright in the FBI, what it was like when he wasn’t working with Gil’s team. Colette Swanson is not a bad person in any way. She’s just FBI and singularly focused on her task, and she feels that Bright might get in the way of that.”

Unfortunately for the team, Swanson isn’t the only one not entirely thrilled with them—”Silent Night” introduces Sean Pertwee’s Shannon, a former detective who dedicated much of his career to catching The Surgeon.

“He’s the person that kind of drove themselves obsessively to solve that case,” Fedak previews. “And in the end, he got jumped by a kid calling in to the police and Gil solving the case. He was happy that The Surgeon was caught, but he also thought there was more to the story. And I think that over the course of the season, especially with the Junkyard Killer, we realized that there was more.”

“Shannon is definitely kind of like our Ahab who is looking for this white whale, and it’s destroyed him,” he continues. “And one of the things that we really want to do is to, over time, get back into that story of how Martin Whitly was arrested—what that trial was like and what it was like for the detectives who worked on the case. Shannon is kind of our first real opportunity to kind of see another one of the people who wasn’t a victim, but was definitely affected, if not destroyed by The Surgeon’s killings.”

And Shannon has gone through a lot since Martin was put away. “It’s a roller coaster in every sense of the word,” Sklaver says. “It’s partly that we have this amazing actor in the role and it’s partly that we have this really rich, deep, nuanced role. But Sean hits every note and it’s a real tour de force.”

PRODIGAL SON, Mondays, 9/8c, Fox

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• PRODIGAL SON: Fox Picks Up Full First Season
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