Bitten creator Daegan Fryklind gets to the heart – and floof – of the show

Daegan Fryklind was in the thick of writing the final episode of Bitten’s second season when Anthony Marco talked to her for the TV Eh B Cs podcast. That of course meant that she had done laundry, walked the dog, swept the floors, and put aside an hour to talk to TV, eh?

Procrastination, thy name is writer.

Then again, the creator of Space’s top original series hasn’t had a day off since the beginning of April. “When you’re in production there’s no such thing as waiting for inspiration to hit you,” she says. “You’re constantly inside the machine.”

“Everything is resting on the finale,” she adds. “All the balls you’ve put up in the air, you have to juggle and then catch in the finale in the most graceful way possible.”

She also writes with “pure optimism” that there will be a season three, meaning fans might expect something of a cliffhanger, and are likely to clamour for another season as well.

The relationship she and the show has with fans on Twitter “has cracked everything open” and created a synergistic relationship. Though she doesn’t craft stories to pander to a fanbase, she does consider how fans will react when planning and writing stories.

There are the “floof moments” when one of the hunky werewolves takes off his shirt, for example, and “heart moments” for the romantic elements that will have fans swooning on Twitter. Then there’s the “vest of asskickery” Jeremy Danvers wears – and fans comment on.

She points out that Space put Bitten into development as part of a deliberate strategy to draw more female viewers to the network, having seen the number of women who attend Comic Con, for example. It’s worked.

Partly because of the fan reaction to the series’ fidelity to the books, Fryklind and her team of writers added for season two the witches who appeared in the second book — sooner than they first intended.
Calling Bitten “a mafia show but instead of the Sopranos you’ve got werewolves,” she points out that season one showed a family with skewed morals while others are challenging their turn.

Season two, then, is “Let the Right One In” as the otherworld elements expand with the witches, and the characters are faced with new threats and decisions on who to trust.

Listen to the full interview with Daegan Fryklind and Anthony Marco as they talk about getting ready for Season Two of Bitten, the interactive relationships between writers and fans, planning a ten episode season, cascading hierarchies of producers, and a little place called Castle Frightenstein.

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