Crime is Paying Off for NCIS: New Orleans

At a cover shoot for TV Guide Magazine, the five principal cast members of NCIS: New Orleans have just come in from filming a scene at the soundstage next door, but you might think they’d dropped by after a night at Tipitina’s, the Spotted Cat, d.b.a, or one of Orleans Parish’s other celebrated nightspots. Things are getting loosey-goosey—emphasis on the goosing—as the quintet squeezes in tight. Lucas Black is tickling Zoe McLellan. McLellan is borrowing Rob Kerkovich’s glasses for that sexy librarian look. It’s up to Scott Bakula to provide the voice of reason. “We’ll hate these shots, I guarantee you,” he says, right after having his manly bosom groped from behind by CCH Pounder.

“Are we confused as to the nature of this procedural?” asks Pounder, suddenly sounding a sober note as she takes her mitts off the series’ star.

“This is full-on thank God it’s Friday,” says Kerkovich, usually the show’s comic foil, adding his own note of mock solemnity to this touchy-feely free-for-all: “So many people have died so far.”

Well, yes, they have, rather reliably, at the predictable rate of one corpse per week, with occasional bonus deaths in instances involving a mad bomber or some such. CBS’s NCIS: New Orleans didn’t get to be the season’s top freshman show by not playing by the procedural rules. What sailor would want to be stationed here after watching a series, which, if taken literally, suggests that Louisiana has an exponentially higher mortality rate among active and former servicemen and servicewomen than any other seaport state?

Probably a lot of impressionable petty officers are champing at that bit, actually, since the series also suggests that it’s worth the risk of being infected with bubonic plague, murdered vampire-style in a cemetery, poisoned with radiation, or shot during Mardi Gras just to live and thrive amid the city’s infectiously celebratory spirit. And although all the principals have been given—in typical NCIS-franchise fashion—slightly angsty backstories, a typical episode is less likely to end on a brooding close-up than with the characters cooking gumbo for one another in the squad room’s kitchen. And can it even be called a squad room, when the cozily funky office set looks like the House of Blues blew up, albeit with most-wanted lineups on the overhead monitors instead of drink specials?

If procedurals are a kind of comfort food, the good-times-and-autopsies mélange of NCIS: New Orleans managed to attract a whopping 18 million viewers (including DVR), on average, in Season 1 by being primetime’s oysters on the shell or its sugary beignet or nightcapping Sazerac.

“Part of what drew me to setting a show down there,” says creator and executive producer Gary Glasberg, “is the contrast of people who work hard and have faced all kinds of adversity—whether it’s Katrina or socio-economic problems—but hold on to each other and rise up and celebrate regardless. And the beauty of New Orleans is that there’s literally a parade or festival for everything. So you’re constantly working around that.” Sometimes they’re also working around that festiveness psychologically, as the city’s eternally high-spirited side can carry over into a kind of light-headedness at the workplace.

“But,” says McLellan (Agent Meredith Brody), “then we have to be reminded, ‘OK, someone’s dead,’ and remember the urgency of the story we’re telling. Especially when the baby was missing [in the April episode “Rock-a-Bye-Baby”]. It’s like, ‘You care about this baby!’ Got to find the baby! Find the Navy baby!” That last singsongy catchphrase has become a running joke between Black and McLellan—with apologies to missing naval infants everywhere, we’re sure.

Maybe they’ve earned this levity, given the pressure everyone faced at the start of the season just to produce a coherent show, with very little time for conceptual lollygagging. “There was a lot of tension at the beginning,” Black says, “but after we got on air, people at the network began to trust us more, and it felt a little more relaxed on set.” A little? “There was a point during this season where we felt comfortable to do our own thing a bit more, because it was like, ‘Huh! People like us!’” And those people have made this the most successful first-year drama since Desperate Housewives exactly a decade earlier.

But in the first year of any show, says Bakula (a veteran of Quantum Leap, Star Trek: Enterprise, and Men of a Certain Age, among many others), “you just never feel like you have your legs underneath you.” He recounts the series’ hurried history, which began with an embedded pilot that took the form of a two-parter on NCIS in spring 2014: “When we actually got the formal invitation that we were being picked up, it was the beginning of May, and then the scramble began to start shooting July 21. This place [in a New Orleans suburb] went from an empty soundstage to something we were shooting on in five weeks. The first day of shooting, they’d barely sealed the paint on the walls and hadn’t hung any lights.

“We’re not all in the same place, either,” he continues, “so there are so many reasons why it should have been a disaster.” He’s talking about how Glasberg and the writing staff stayed in Los Angeles—and so, in a way, did Bakula, who flew home every weekend, not wanting to uproot his family just as his son was entering high school. Somehow, Bakula also flew to San Francisco a few times to shoot three episodes of HBO’s Looking, fulfilling his promise to wrap up a supporting role on that niche drama’s second season even as he was anchoring TV’s hottest new mainstream show. But that shoulda-been disastrousness “hasn’t been,” he says. “And because they picked us up so early, all our directors are lined up for next year, so invariably it’s going to be an easier process.” Not the big easy, mind you—since, Bakula says, “they keep making the episodes bigger and harder to do”—but easier.

First, there’s a freshman season to wrap. Back on the soundstage, Bakula is shooting a scene for the penultimate episode with Steven Weber (Wings), who has a recurring role as a presumably corrupt city councilman whose unctuousness can be measured by his insistence on wearing sharp suits even in the harshest humidity. You can see the familiarity between these TV pros when they both flub their lines and Bakula quips, “Together, we almost add up to one actor.”

Their characters are discussing the city-rattling repercussions of violence perpetrated by Baitfish, a villain who’s been Special Agent Dwayne Pride’s bête noire throughout the season. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say that Baitfish’s mayhem is the focus of the May 5 episode, which opens the door to an even wider world of crime involving the New Orleans seaport in the May 12 finale. Weber’s politician and Bakula’s determined Pride are going at it over who’s to blame for some very public casualties, before Weber finally lowers his voice and says, “No matter what you think of me, I love this city too.” Which may be setting Weber up to be more sympathetic in Season 2, because, really, how can anyone crush so hard on NOLA and be all creep?

Just as the medical profession’s primary dictum is “First, do no harm,” this show’s initial mission was: Don’t tick off the host city. By that measure, too, the series has been a smashing success—even if everyone you run into in New Orleans will eagerly tell you, unprompted, which actors get the accents right.

“Everybody thinks I’m faking it,” says Black (Special Agent Christopher LaSalle), the lone primary cast member with a real-life Southern twang, thanks to his upbringing in nearby Alabama. “I’ve worked on this accent for 32 years. I feel like I’ve finally got it down pat. It’s a struggle, what we go through as actors.” Another thing he doesn’t actually struggle with: “I love the steaming heat, and I get to laugh at everybody who doesn’t.”

Pounder, who plays coroner Loretta Wade, had a tougher time adjusting, even though she’s gradually shifting her home base from L.A. to New Orleans. “I have to have faith that if the first [NCIS] show has been running for 12 years, maybe the second show [NCIS: Los Angeles] will run for eight years, and maybe this show will run for six or seven.” But, she adds, “I’m a Caribbean person, and this is a Caribbean country, stuck in America. Well, not stuck—happily hanging out in America—and therefore it has all the problems that that has: The heat come summertime is hellish, and that’s when we start our [production] season. I’m hoping to drop enough weight so that the water’s not just pouring out of me like it did last year, when I thought, ‘I’m going to die.’”

Northeast native Kerkovich arrived at an analogy for the city after first visiting (and feeling out of place on) legendarily rowdy Bourbon Street: “A local reporter asked me, ‘What do you think about New Orleans?’ I said. ‘It’s like Bartertown,’ from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which couldn’t be more obscure, because Bartertown isn’t even in the title of the movie. I thought, ‘This interview has tanked.’ I referenced the third Mad Max movie?’” (Yes, the resident forensic scientist is at least as ready with the pop cultural references off screen as on.) “But it’s cool to not be in the L.A./Hollywood world. Here you can go into a coffee shop and not every single person is working on a screenplay. They’re all on their laptops writing jazz.”

Bakula, who’s developed a list of favorite local nightspots despite spending his weekends in L.A., laughs when he’s reminded how he initially hoped the series could be filmed in Hollywood. “There’s a huge commitment to trying to do it correctly here,” he says. “I’ve lived in a lot of great cities in the United States, but this one’s unique in that people are always saying to me, ‘We love what you’re doing here. How are you liking my city?’ There’s this possessiveness about it. You don’t usually hear people say, ‘How are you loving my Santa Monica?’ I love how the people do things outside their homes here, which is kind of counter to the world that’s becoming more like, ‘How can I watch a movie in my house?’”

Not that anyone at this photo shoot wants to discourage NCIS: NOLA binge-watching, although it can lead viewers to mistake the actors for their characters, which they still find amusing. McLellan recalls an exchange she had with a local on Frenchmen Street. “My sister and I went out to hear music,” she says, “and as I go up to the bar to get a drink, this college girl is standing there and is like [affects thick Louisiana accent], ‘Brody, oh my God, hi! Is Pride with you?’ I said no. She said, ‘Good, because I’d do him right here.’”

Perhaps they need to throw in even more morgue scenes, then? Because while this show may be big, it probably shouldn’t feel that easy.

NCIS: New Orleans airs Tuesdays, 9/8c, CBS

Stations of the Cross: How Jesus is Saving Primetime

It’s the greatest story ever told…and told…and told again. “Hollywood,” says Craig Detweiler, a professor of communication at Pepperdine University, “is constantly forgetting and then remembering this character who is revered and studied by hundreds of millions of people on a weekly basis.” Leave it to Jesus, who went momentarily unrecognized by Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, to be hiding in plain sight—at least as far as the entertainment industry’s attentions are concerned.

But executives don’t have ADD about the Bible anymore—they’ve got A.D. The Bible Continues, plus a batch of others besides. Even veteran viewers of Good Book–to–boob tube adaptations have never witnessed a wave of biblically based television and movies quite like the tsunami of Scripture TV descending on screens like so much white foam over an Egyptian army. You could see it as an ongoing response to the record-breaking box office of Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ ($612 million worldwide) or just a cyclical reiteration of how every third generation needs its own King of Kings or Ben-Hur. Maybe it’s even a sign that spirituality is blossoming in Hollywood’s executive boardrooms. (Insert holy laughter here.) But heathens and believers suddenly have more 2,000-year-old entertainment choices than you can shake a study Bible at.

Most have been one-offs, but NBC’s A.D. has the legs and plotlines to last well past Ascension Day. Attracting 9.5 million viewers in its Easter debut and handily winning the night, the series is scheduled for a 12-week run (airing Sundays at 9/8c)—and producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey hope it will score a second season. (If you saw the first-episode spoiler that had Jesus telling Peter, “One day you will die for me,” rest assured the show’s creators will be putting off the fulfillment of that Easter egg for as long as possible.) Religio-historical dramas aren’t just for basic cable anymore, not after Burnett and Downey’s The Bible premiered to 13.1 million viewers on the History channel in 2013.

For evangelicals, A.D. is the draw of the season, although other religious constituencies have also been addressed. The slightly skeptical had the National Geographic Channel’s Killing Jesus. For the somewhat more skeptical: CNN’s alliterative documentary Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery. Then there was CBS’s The Dovekeepers, Downey and Burnett’s fictionalized drama set at the first-century fortress of Masada, in which its comely leads got to know one another in the biblical sense.

A similar boom is evident in cinemas, with Burnett and Downey having successfully re-edited The Bible into the 138-minute 2014 feature Son of God. “The fact that Christians went to theaters and watched a repackaged version just because they wanted to make a statement is a sign of how desperate they are to see their values affirmed,” says Mark Joseph, a Christian producer and marketing consultant, about Son of God’s $68 million worldwide gross. Last year also saw a pair of fanciful Old Testament movies in Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings, although their disappointing returns may be indicative of what happens when auteurs tick off the faithful. It remains to be seen whether churchgoers will feel wooed or shooed by an adaptation of Anne Rice’s controversial Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt that’s in postproduction or by the movie about the New Testament’s most celebrated convert, Paul, that’s just been announced with Hugh Jackman, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon producing. Meanwhile, the redoubtable Burnett and Downey are behind a big-screen Ben-Hur remake that’s currently in production. Looking for a smart investment in 2015? You might want to consider the toga and tunic industries.

A.D. focuses on the apostles’ ministries after Christ’s resurrection and ascension—although you may notice a lot more foot chases, villainy, and bloodletting than the author of the Book of Acts ever transcribed. If the series does get extra-biblical, however, conservative Christians trust Burnett and Downey as two of their own. Last year, in promoting Exodus: Gods and Kings, star Christian Bale described his Moses as “likely schizophrenic.” No worries about any such heresy with this duo at the helm.

Phil Cooke, an evangelical writer and producer of the upcoming Christian-music movie Hillsong: Let Hope Rise, defends the traditionalist approach. “There’s no question that Hollywood is getting the message that the more biblically accurate the movie or TV series, the greater the audience,” he says. “Mark and Roma are proving that. The great challenge is that movie studios and TV networks aren’t Christian organizations. They’re driven by creative people who want to put their own spin on stories.” As a creative professional himself, Cooke understands that impulse, adding, “If I were shooting a classic fairy tale, I would want to bring something new to telling that story. And since many of these filmmakers aren’t believers, they look at these Bible stories the same way I’d look at a fairy tale.”

Author and radio host Eric Metaxas, a celebrated figure in evangelicalism since writing a best-selling biography of German Christian hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer, concurs. “Mark and Roma bring a much-longed-for respect to biblical narratives, one that’s been sorely lacking in recent decades,” he says, adding that exhibiting perceived contempt for your core audience will never fly. “[Martin] Scorsese’s unintentionally hilarious The Last Temptation of Christ, with Willem Dafoe as a mealy-mouthed pseudo-savior, was the first of these fiascoes. A.D. is proving the magnitude of the audience interested in a serious treatment of biblical subjects.” His enthusiasm has been echoed in positive notices from the presidents of the National Religious Broadcasters, Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention, among others.

Although Killing Jesus didn’t get nearly the same endorsements, the three-hour drama made a killing (sorry) for National Geographic; with 3.7 million viewers, the premiere boasted the network’s largest audience to date. The big bow came in spite of brickbats from such conservative Christian outlets as Movieguide.com, which warned that the TV movie offered “a Jesus who’s not divine, who performs no miracles, and who’s full of doubt,” before concluding, “We suggest viewers skip watching Killing Jesus and watch A.D. instead.” One person who’s been involved in marketing religious projects to Christians (and prefers not to be identified because nearly everyone in evangelical media circles ends up working together at some point) posits that Bill O’Reilly, an executive producer and coauthor of the source book, “essentially did a secular version of Jesus’s story, and the only reason it didn’t get organized protests is because he’s on Fox News. A lot of Christian viewers like his political views but can’t figure out his faith.”

Getting pegged as the open-minded person’s guide to Christ was fine by Nat Geo, which wanted to play Killing Jesus as religiously nonpartisan. “This is a story that has been told trillions of times,” says Heather Moran, the network’s executive vice president of programming and strategy. “By stripping away what was most familiar to so many, it [became] such a powerful story. That was a very conscious choice of ours, to keep those details open to interpretation so different viewers with different perspectives could come to this historical spine of a story and use it as a jumping-off point for what they personally might bring to the table.” In the end, Killing Jesus split the difference between faith-based and secular audiences—leaving any resurrection off screen but still showing an empty tomb—and for all the publicized emphasis on outside history and scholarship, it took many of its events and dialogue straight from the gospels.

A.D. gave us a majestically backlit warrior-angel rolling away the stone, while the dustier Killing Jesus preferred to let the mystery be. What the two have in common is how they essentially play out as political thrillers, not spiritual reveries. In the days of such Cecil B. DeMille biblical epics as 1949’s Samson and Delilah, the joke (and maybe reality) was that churchgoers ostensibly came for the piety but stuck around for the chance to see sinful temptresses in skimpy outfits. The modern analogy is in how much these new projects make the religious aspects somewhat secondary to the machinations of the bad guys. None has gone quite as far as the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which had the temerity to bump Judas up to colead. But Pontius Pilate is almost always going to wind up being a more fun character to depict than a Messiah whose most famous cryptic aphorisms aren’t about to get a dialogue polish.

If you’re a Christian tired of seeing the Messiah alternately portrayed as a stiff, saintly victim or (occasionally) tortured neurotic, you might consider the historical taboo on filmic portrayals of Muhammad and develop a slight case of Muslim envy. Back in the CinemaScope era, Christ arguably made a greater impression as a cameo player in Ben-Hur, showing up just long enough to have the hem of his garment touched, than he did in the whole of The Greatest Story Ever Told. So part of the canniness of A.D.—not to get too irreverent about it—is that the series kills off this dramatically risky and unwieldy character before the first commercial break and doesn’t even let Jesus stick around past the second hour, so as not to get in the way of all the bloodshed, Lady Macbeth–style conniving, and disciples-on-the-run
action that make it more of a diverting potboiler than a Sunday-school lesson.

The Old Testament doesn’t present as great a risk in adaptation as do Jesus’s red-letter words. But filmmakers can still run into danger—as demonstrated by Exodus: Gods and Kings director (and Killing Jesus executive producer) Ridley Scott’s divisive decision to portray God as a petulant boy and Darren Aronofsky’s infamous rock monsters in Noah. “In order for a biblical epic to be financially successful, you need the evangelical audience to become engaged,” says Matthew Paul Turner, author of Our Great Big American God and a leading figure in the progressive Christian movement. “But evangelicals are nitpicky about the details of their Bible stories, often carrying the persona of ‘protectors’ of God’s stories. That’s why Noah infuriated many of them, because rather than being able to sit back and enjoy a creative expression loosely based on Genesis, they squirmed at every turn away from how the Bible portrays the Great Flood.” There is a mainline church audience that isn’t hung up on absolute biblical literalism, says Turner, who believes “progressive Christians mostly just want to see a well-told story, one that doesn’t overplay the torture of Jesus for dramatic effect and one in which Jesus isn’t a hot white guy.”

The emphasis on bloodshed in most of these adaptations doesn’t sit well with some mainline Christians—not even when it’s Jesus’s blood. “In journalism, the standard is ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ and I think it’s the same in these sensationalist film depictions of Christ,” says Rev. Kathy Cooper-Ledesma, pastor of Hollywood United Methodist Church, which has many constituents from the entertainment industry. “They’re all about the substitutionary-atonement theory, focusing on violence and guilt and the belief that God required a blood sacrifice. That’s not the God I believe in at all. The greater story we celebrate is the love of God, but these TV shows don’t consider that dramatic enough.”

And then there are believers who just think other TV shows are better at illustrating the Bible than, say, The Bible. “I’m far more intrigued by the spiritual, ethical, and moral questions raised by Orphan Black or Sons of Anarchy,” says Cathleen Falsani, author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, “than I am interested in another film interpretation of a biblical story that may or may not have a hidden religious or political agenda.”

A.D., as it goes along, will inevitably delve more into the realm of pure speculation, as accounts of the disciples’ post-Pentecost lives get harder to divine from the sketchy scriptural narratives. And based on the good will that Burnett and Downey have already built up in conservative Christian circles, they’ll probably get away with making up more of the details. But in one early scene in A.D., before Jesus leaves the building, you get a glimpse of what could have been in a straightforward Christ-tale telling. Jesus, popping up at his followers’ hideout, at first spooks them with his ability to forgo niceties such as entering through doors. And then, with a big grin, he asks, “Is there any food?” That’s a Jesus we could still stand to see more of on screen, even after all these tellings: one who is as in touch with his human side—and not even in a tortured way—as his followers are hungry for divine revelations.

Game of Thrones Returns With Family Feuds, Surprising Alliances, And Dragons!

The death of powerful patriarch Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) is no laughing matter. But on the Belfast set of Game of Thrones, while shooting a scene in which the ruthless former Hand of the King lies in state, actors Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lena Headey—who play his incestuous twin offspring, Jaime and Cersei—are having trouble suppressing giggles.

“They thought it would be really funny to make him laugh, but he’s a fully committed corpse,” says executive producer David Benioff. Kidding around on set is therapeutic: It keeps the cast from getting weighed down by the show’s unrelenting bleakness. But it’s this can’t-look-away mix of heartbreak, family drama, and, of course, gruesome deaths that has earned the fantasy series, based on George R.R. Martin’s bestselling novels, millions of fans worldwide. One of them: the queen of England, who toured the Belfast set last year. “I told her the iron throne was uncomfortable!” Headey says. “It’s slightly terrifying and intimidating to be in the presence of the queen. Then you realize she’s very cool.”

The struggle for that seat of power gets even nastier in Season 5, with more action and elaborate special effects that go well beyond what the show has ever attempted (one sequence alone took 17 days to shoot). And guess what, fans of the novels? Even you won’t know what’s coming next. “We’re not working off the books anymore,” Benioff says, “but off of conversations with George. We’re now adapting the overarching story.”

No matter what direction the drama takes, one thing is for sure: There will be a helluva body count. At the end of Season 4, Tywin sentenced his son Tyrion (Peter Dinklage, who won an Emmy in 2011 for the role) to death for poisoning sadistic teen king Joffrey (Jack Gleeson)—one of Cersei and Jaime’s three illegitimate children, whom they’ve passed off as heirs to her dead husband, King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy). The innocent Tyrion escaped, thanks to Jaime, and headed directly to Tywin’s chamber, where he promptly slew dear old dad—who was on the loo at the time—then bolted, leaving Cersei screaming for Tyrion’s head.

“Had Jaime known his brother was going to kill Tywin, he wouldn’t have let him go,” Coster-Waldau says. “Apart from the fact that he was their father, Tywin kept enemies from getting any funny ideas. Now it’s dangerous, and Cersei’s not happy with Jaime. They could use some couples therapy.”

Even daily sessions with Dr. Phil couldn’t help this twisted pair, whose twincest set off a chain reaction in Season 1 when young Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), the son of the noble family that the Lannisters have all but destroyed, accidentally stumbled onto the couple having sex. Jaime pushed the child out a window to keep him quiet, paralyzing him. And it’s been war, literally, ever since.

The endless conflict has toughened Cersei and battered Jaime. Once the kingdom’s greatest knight, fiercest fighter, and biggest egomaniac, he’s grown more reflective after being taken prisoner and having his sword hand cruelly chopped off. Worse, Cersei hasn’t been faithful. “Cersei’s always steering. Jaime’s purer in his love,” Headey says. “Last season, they slowly regained their passion. But now they’re in the worst place they’ve been in their relationship in terms of trust.”

“Jaime’s responsible for Tywin’s death, so [in his eyes] he’s also responsible for Cersei’s pain,” Coster-Waldau says. “He feels he has to prove something to Cersei—as well as to himself. He wants to do the right thing.” For that to happen, he must embark on a risky secret mission to retrieve their teenage daughter, Myrcella (Nell Tiger Free).

Dorne: A New Land and New Dangers for Jaime Lannister
Soon after Season 5 begins, Jaime is en route to the region of Dorne accompanied by mercenary-turned-knight Bronn (Jerome Flynn), who calls their destination a place people visit only for sex and sword fighting.

To capture this sunny land of anything goes, producers headed to Spain for the first time. (They also shot in Ireland and Croatia.) Standing in for Dorne’s castle and water gardens was Seville’s royal palace of Alcázar, where the show was given access to areas previously off limits. (The series is so popular in Spain that producers received 86,000 applications for 600 jobs as extras.)

Filming in the elaborate Moorish-style palace helped Coster-Waldau fully immerse himself in his character’s journey. “There’s a richness to being in a place instead of using CGI,” he says. “You feel the history.” Jaime will also feel the wrath of Ellaria Sand (Indira Varma). She blames the Lannisters for the murder of her lover, Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), who was killed during an eye-popping duel in King’s Landing last season. Hell-bent on vengeance, she is willing to fight to the death with help from Oberyn’s warrior daughters, the Sand Snakes: Obara (Keisha Castle-Hughes), Nymeria (Jessica Henwick), and Tyene (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers). But Jaime has a new trick up his sleeve. “Instead of looking at his golden hand as a hindrance, he starts to see it as a weapon,” Coster-Waldau says.

King’s Landing: Cersei Struggles
With Jaime away, the always-conniving Cersei maneuvers to stay in power in King’s Landing after her young son Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman) is crowned and promised to Joffrey’s ex Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer). “This season has been the most exciting for me in terms of acting,” Headey says. “It’s the start of everything falling away from Cersei. Her belief in her own competence, strength, and ability to fool everybody and play the game bites her in the ass. She makes questionable choices, believing it will add to her status and control.”

One choice is to ally with a new character, the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), a man of faith. “Their relationship is important,” Benioff says, “because Cersei realizes she can use him and religion for her own purposes.”

As the season progresses, Cersei takes on a shocking new appearance. “It was a great change from looking polished,” Headey says. “The latter half of the season is tough. Cersei’s broken down by the end.”

The Wall: Can Jon Snow Protect the Kingdom and Himself?
Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Ned Stark’s noble bastard son—who led the meager Night’s Watch forces to defend the Wall from hordes of Wildlings in a spectacular Season 4 battle that killed the love of his life, Ygritte (Rose Leslie)—must delve into politics, which can prove deadlier than fighting axe-wielding giants. “Ned disliked politics but was drawn into it,” Benioff says. “That’s what happens to Jon this season.”

His biggest political move: deciding whether he will side with Wildling King Beyond the Wall Mance Rayder (Ciarán Hinds) or Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), who considers himself the true king of Westeros. Stannis arrived at the Wall with his massive army last season and took Mance prisoner. “Jon’s come to respect the Wildlings and likes Mance,” Benioff says. “That complicates things.”

So it’s a good thing Jon is finally taking charge. “He doesn’t want to be ordered around,” Harington says. “He starts making decisions and doing things his way.” Adds executive producer D.B. Weiss, “Question of the day: How do you do all this without getting your head chopped off?”

Jon will have to remain extra sharp as he marches into battle again at a village called Hardhome. The skirmish was the season’s most grueling shoot for Harington, with 13-hour workdays and tricky fight choreography. “The stunt work this year was quite daunting and intricate,” Harington says. “I had to step aside a few more times [than usual] for stunt doubles. It was dangerous.”

The sequence’s special effects didn’t come cheap. Game of Thrones reportedly cost at least $8 million per episode this season—money well spent, according to Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president of programming. “The needs of the storytelling drive the budget,” he says. “This show opened my eyes to what quality TV needs to look like. I’m not a genre or sci-fi geek, but I’m a geek for great writing.”

The Vale: Sansa Goes to the Dark Side
The writing takes a daring turn this year when the tale of Jon’s half sister, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), goes beyond what happens in Martin’s books. Last season, the once-timid girl, who had been married off to Tyrion, escaped King’s Landing with the help of Westeros’s own Frank Underwood, political operator Petyr Baelish, aka Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen). The unlikely duo took refuge in her Aunt Lysa’s (Kate Dickie) home in the Vale of Arryn. Along the way, Sansa learned Littlefinger had helped orchestrate Joffrey’s death. Her middle-aged guardian planted a creepy kiss on her and later killed Lysa to save Sansa’s life. By the season finale, Sansa had transformed into a raven-haired, black-clad strategist prepared to play the game and help Littlefinger in his master plan to control the kingdom.

“She’s been an observer of tragedy her whole life,” Weiss says. “Everything she’s seen has been a horrible, teachable moment. And now she’s ready to unleash what she’s learned.”

Essos: Across the Sea, Strangers Meet
At the end of Season 4, both Sansa’s sister Arya (Maisie Williams) and Tyrion were sailing east across the sea. “They are on separate journeys,” Benioff says. “But these storylines start to converge.”

They are traveling to Essos, a sprawling continent that includes the Free Cities and Slaver’s Bay, where mother of dragons Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) has recently abolished slavery and struggles to control the city of Meereen.

Arya, still determined to avenge the Stark family, arrives in the free city of Braavos. There, the tough teen gets a new look and begins a fresh phase of her education. “The people there are very mysterious and philosophical,” Benioff says. “She learns there are different skills to develop beyond sword fighting,” Weiss adds.

Tyrion arrives in port far less hopeful. Spymaster Varys (Conleth Hill) has smuggled him over the sea in a crate. When Tyrion emerges, “He’s not the wise-cracking, ironically distant cynic he’s been,” Weiss says. “He’s a broken human being.”

That’s understandable, considering he’s murdered not only his father but also his former lover Shae (Sibel Kekilli). “He’s never really going to recover,” Benioff says. “He’s just trying to find something to keep him putting one foot in front of the other.”

Varys attempts to motivate Tyrion by asking him to help in his mission to put a new ruler on the iron throne, someone who will finally bring peace and stability to the kingdom. Varys won’t say exactly who he has in mind, but he makes it clear it’s not a man.

Daenerys may be that woman—but if so, is she ready to rule? “She’s learning,” Clarke says. “She realizes she was naive to think that freeing the slaves would bring happiness all around.”

She’s a fair, revolutionary ruler, and still some of her subjects want her dead, so she must make savvy decisions to stay alive. With her adviser, Ser Jorah (Iain Glen), exiled for spying, “She listens to her own advice—and makes mistakes,” Clarke says. Luckily, she has a supportive, if scaly, family. “The dragons are testing her parenting skills to their limits. But she realizes she can harness their power for the greater good. It may not be good in the moment, but it will be good afterward,” Clarke hints.

Good? On Game of Thrones? Before you get too excited, heed these words from Benioff: “In Season 5, you should be worried about everybody.”

Game of Thrones returns Sunday, April 12, 9/8c, HBO.

Mad Men: The Drama Behind the Drama That Changed TV

Check out our Mad Men covers here.

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Matthew Weiner established himself as a sitcom writer in the late 1990s, toiling away on such shows as The Naked Truth and Becker. But on the side, he was working on a different kind of project: a drama set in the 1960s New York advertising world.

“I paid someone to do research for me,” Weiner recalls. “Then between the second and third season of Becker, I pulled the trigger and wrote it.” Weiner’s manager eventually got that early Mad Men script into the hands of The Sopranos creator David Chase, who immediately offered Weiner a job writing for the HBO drama.

Weiner’s tenure on The Sopranos gave him enough credibility to dust off Mad Men and pitch it again. In 2006, AMC—a struggling cable network looking for its first major series—bit. Seven seasons later, Mad Men has been widely hailed as one of the greatest dramas in television history, star Jon Hamm has become a household name, and AMC is a cable force. As the show returns April 5 for the final seven episodes, its stars, executives, and producers recount how the world went mad for Men.

Rob Sorcher (former executive vice president of programming and production, AMC): We didn’t have a signature series that people were talking about. There was a fear that AMC would be dropped from cable systems [if we didn’t get one].

Ed Carroll (chief operating officer, AMC Networks): We were not overly concerned about having a ratings hit at the time. What we were really looking for was distinction.

Sorcher: Matthew Weiner came in and gave this powerful pitch. The real question was, how were we going to do it? Our programming budget was so low. And it was a period piece, about advertising. Everything said: “Don’t green-light this show!”

Kevin Beggs (chairman and CEO, Lionsgate Television, which produces Mad Men): There were certainly questions from our international distribution guys about the viability of a period show that was so insular and so focused on one aspect of American business life. Plus, basic cable was not yet the hotbed of auteur-driven programming it has become. We just couldn’t make the numbers work. So AMC made the pilot on their own.

Weiner: That pilot cost just over $3 million—and it looked like three times that. We couldn’t afford to film outside. I had this idea that a very detailed interior would be just as exciting to the audience as re-creating Madison Avenue.

Sorcher: Matt asked Alan Taylor to direct while all his buddies on The Sopranos were on hiatus. They shot the pilot in 10 days in Queens.

Weiner: We were making a period show at the same time [the movies] Across the Universe and Revolutionary Road were filming in New York City. Just getting costumes for the extras was impossible. We were the least important ’60s project being shot in America.

Beggs: [With the pilot] I had something to show, and we finally negotiated an agreement to produce the series. Amazingly, Mad Men, which is so dialogue rich, was shot on a seven-day schedule. That’s incredible. Most broadcast shows start at eight days and inflate from there.

Sorcher: Our first-season budget was around $2 million an episode. There were moments where we weren’t sure we could deliver the show the pilot promised. Matt was very concerned. There were excellent financial reasons to get Lionsgate on board. They knew what they were doing.

Weiner: Everyone took advantage of the fact that basic cable had different rules, and we were able to hire a bunch of actors who were not yet household names. Big names weren’t interested in being in a show on AMC.

Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell): Matthew Weiner was set on one guy [for adman Don Draper]: Jon Hamm.

Weiner: Writing the role, I was thinking about James Garner. He’s handsome, charming, and also really cynical. But at the time there was an antihero atmosphere in TV, and people like Jon were being cast mostly as villains. [AMC] suggested a couple of British actors, but I didn’t want to do that. Don Draper’s big secret is not that he’s British.

Hamm (Don Draper): It was the best pilot I’d ever read. The only other time I’d had that experience was when I read the West Wing pilot. But they cast Rob Lowe.

Weiner: I had this litmus test: At the end of the pilot when you find out Don Draper is married, are viewers going to hate this man? When I met Jon, it was like, “No, they’re not going to hate this guy.” There was some question about his sex appeal, which is now legendary.

Hamm: You’re not playing Superman. You’re not playing the embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way. So it’s not necessarily fun to be in Don’s head space. But it is challenging and attractive as an actor to get the opportunity to play that moral ambiguity.

John Slattery (Roger Sterling): I was called in to audition for Don. There’s a little disappointment when someone tells you they want you to read for Don Draper and you do all your homework [and] then they say, “We already have this guy, but we want you to play this other guy.” I met Jon shortly thereafter and I was like, “They do have that guy.”

Weiner: I didn’t approve of the trick, but whatever gets you there. I heard John wouldn’t come in otherwise. Then I had to talk him into being a part of the show.

Slattery: I was wary. And I don’t think I was fully invested while shooting the pilot—there wasn’t very much of Roger in that first episode. Matt did say, “I promise you, this will be a great part.” He was right about that.

Kartheiser: My agent would come to me with scripts and I’d go, “That sounds great. But what’s going on with that show I auditioned for months ago?” There was just something about the [Mad Men] script. It wasn’t about crime or like anything else on TV at the time. I was like, “My God, I want to go to a place where I get to say those words.”

Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson): I remember walking out of [reading for Weiner]. I called my manager and said, “I have to work with that man.”

Christina Hendricks (Joan Holloway/Harris): I originally got an audition call for Peggy. I told them, “This is a role for someone in their twenties.” Weeks later, I got the audition for [office manager] Joan. I was called back to read for the part of [illustrator] Midge, and then once more for Joan. It was that point in pilot season where as an actor you reach peak exhaustion and frustration. And at the time, there was no indication that any of the roles would turn into series regulars.

Weiner: Once Christina came in and read for Joan, she became a major character in my mind.

Hendricks: My agents dropped me right after I did the -pilot. They were like, “We warned you not to do this AMC pilot because we’re not going to make any money.”

Hamm: There was no star of the show. There was no person who was this big celebrity that we were circling. We were all hustling actors who wanted to do their best.

Robert Morse (Bert Cooper): They had already filmed the pilot and were back in Los Angeles [when I auditioned]. I walked in the door and there was a young man who was handling scripts. I was a little nervous and said, “Hi. I have this script here. I don’t quite understand what I’m reading. Can you understand this?” The young man said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. You go in, you’ll be fine.” I walked in and, my God, Matt Weiner was the boy. I was so embarrassed.

Weiner: He thought I was a production assistant! John Slattery had not committed to more than a season at that point, so I needed to create more of a world at the agency, just in case. Eccentricity is something you get when you hire Robert Morse. He said “goody” in the audition. And I put it in the script.

January Jones (Betty Draper/Francis): I went in to audition for Peggy, but Matt said, “There’s this other role.…” He was struggling with the network about Don’s domestic life. I don’t think they were as interested in finding out about who Don Draper was at home. Matt fought back on that.

Weiner: We had an unusual amount of secrecy from the very start. January Jones, for instance, was not part of the initial press launch because I did not want the audience to know that Don was married. I had this confidentiality threat on the cover of the script, which I borrowed from The Sopranos almost word for word. Everyone around me thought it was amusing. They were like, “You’re lucky if anybody cares about this show.”

Moss: I am now a disciple of Matt Weiner and his idea of keeping secrets. I hate spoilers. Matt would faint if he knew anyone on our show was live tweeting during an episode, because you’re supposed to watch the episode, not look at Twitter.

Charlie Collier (president, AMC): The lead-in to the Mad Men premiere was Goodfellas. We thought, take an iconic Scorsese film, filled with a lot of dark rooms and a bunch of men who think they are beyond the rules, and use it to launch our epic new series.

Sorcher: Not many people tuned in. There was some concern that first season, but that concern went away when the critics started writing about the show. It was the critics who ensured that this show got renewed.

Slattery: It took a while to make a dent in a popular way.

Carroll: You never green-light your first scripted series and expect to collect an Emmy for outstanding drama. It was a nice surprise. Then the show began to explode—you would see it in the style pages, references to Don Draper in the sports pages. It started popping up all over.

Season 1 ended with Don’s secretary, Peggy, giving birth to account man Pete Campbell’s baby, and Sterling Cooper partner Bert finding out Don’s shocking secret—his real name is Dick Whitman, and he stole a dead soldier’s identity. Season 2 was set a year later, in 1962.

Weiner: The skipping forward was a reaction to my fear that I did not have enough story. I felt that picking up the day after Peggy has the baby would just be too soapy.

Moss: The end of Season 2 when Peggy tells Pete about the baby and that she gave it away was one of the most beautifully written scenes I’ve ever been given.

Kartheiser: When it came to Peggy, I don’t know if it was ever about bedding her as much as it was something that gave Pete a sense of power that he lacked in his life. I think in some ways he hasn’t really graduated from that.

Season 2 featured many shockers, including Joan’s rape by fiancé Greg (Sam Page).

Hendricks: I was proud of how we did it. But I was surprised, and sometimes outraged, at the way that people phrased the conversation.

Weiner: The thing that was shocking to me was that there was a debate in the public about whether this was rape.

But Weiner says what generated even more controversy was the episode in which Don and Betty leave a pile of trash on the grass after a family picnic.

Weiner: I had to explain to the actors, because they are younger than me, that people used to just dump trash out and they would not look back. I had an overarching interest in the passage of time and showing certain things, like New York City becoming more dangerous and louder and more violent. Obviously the lawn-mower incident later in Season 3 [when a joyriding employee runs over the foot of an executive from the agency’s new British owner] is a dramatic moment that defined the show in many ways. We got the idea from stories we had heard about extremely dangerous, drunken behavior happening in these offices.

Slattery: Then there was the episode where I sang “My Old Kentucky Home” in blackface. I realize you can’t pick—you go where the character and the story go. But that was jarring. I remember the reaction of the first person who saw me step out of the van: It was an African-American motorcycle cop, with his mouth hanging open.

At the end of Season 3, Weiner dissolved Sterling Cooper to form a new agency. And, after years of Don’s philandering, the Drapers’ marriage was over.

Weiner: I was inspired by Weeds, where creator Jenji Kohan just burned down the entire town. It was a tough thing to get rid of the Sterling Cooper offices. I was superstitious about losing that set, and it was a huge financial commitment from Lionsgate to allow us to start over.

Jones: People wanted Don and Betty to get back -together. It was so unrealistic and dysfunctional, but fans loved their dynamic, as ugly and flawed as it was.

Morse: There were more women with their arms around [Don] than ever. I think we were the first Fifty Shades of Grey.

Weiner: I was not going to spend the rest of the series playing cat and mouse with that marriage. But when we started Season 4 and Don was divorced, I started having second thoughts, because I realized there was not a big tradition in American culture of telling a story about a divorced man. I came to the conclusion those kinds of stories weren’t written because the men didn’t stay divorced very long.

Jessica Paré (Megan Calvet/Draper): After the first time Don and [his new secretary] Megan kissed, one of the guys in the costume department said, “It was nice knowing you.” Then our propmaster came into my dressing room the week before we were shooting the second-to-last episode of Season 4, and she said, “I need to measure your ring finger.” I was so overcome.

Weiner: [Don’s proposal to Megan] was the act of a man trying to start over. The impulsiveness of it, that is pure Don Draper: “Let’s get married right now.” Don had an idealized version of that relationship, which really didn’t include anything Megan wanted. As soon as she expressed a desire to follow her own dream [of acting], it became a rejection of Don. Megan is the first contemporary woman on the show, in terms of her ambitions and how she asserts herself and what she thinks she’s entitled to.

Joan asserted herself by making the tough decision to sleep with a sleazy Jaguar executive in exchange for a partnership at the firm in Season 5.

Hendricks: That was based around many real stories that Matt had heard from women [in that era]. There were a lot of cheerleaders for Joan. I’d run into women in bathrooms and they would be like, “Girl, I would’ve done that.” And other people were upset.

In 2010, Weiner’s contract expired—and the tense negotiations played out in the press.

Weiner: There were conversations going on between AMC and Lionsgate that I didn’t know about. There were some demands being made about the running time, product placement, and the cast. I did not want to do it. There were all kinds of cost-cutting measures and control issues and I was like, “I thought we were in this together.”

Hamm: My thought was always that you’re not going to kill the golden goose. Everybody complains and then they eventually come to a deal.

Weiner: The great thing was being able to go back to work and pretend like it didn’t happen. There was so much more openness after that.

Over the years, viewers said goodbye to many characters, including Sal (Bryan Batt), a closeted gay man who was fired when he brushed off the advances of a client, and Lane (Jared Harris), a partner who hanged himself in the office after admitting to embezzling.

Weiner: There aren’t a lot of deaths on Mad Men. But if you get fired, you might as well be dead. There had to be stakes. Even when we had Peggy go to another agency, we did everything we could to convince the audience that Peggy was going to be a minor player at that point.

The first half of Season 7 concluded with the moon landing—and Bert’s death. Roger maneuvers a sale of the company, allowing for Don, who was put on leave after melting down during a Hershey’s pitch in Season 6, to resume his old position. Later, Don daydreams of Bert singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” giving Broadway vet Morse a chance to exit with a song and dance.

Morse: It was a lovely moment, I thought.

Weiner: In the end, they all got rich, but Bert is dead. And questions remain: Can Don and Peggy have a relationship again? Can Don and Roger have a relationship again? Can Don prove himself to new partner Cutler [Harry Hamlin]?

Hamm: When we first met Don, he was the master of his universe, although it was wobbly. We see him struggling with selling cigarettes. It’s a very quick realization that something is rotten. He’s living a double life, and that’s tricky. So, he’s set up to fail. It’s no accident that the credit sequence shows a man seemingly in charge of his environment and then the environment falls apart around him—and he falls. That has been the arc of the character for seven seasons—a fall. And so the hope is that he recovers or that the fall leads to something else, because nobody wants to see the splat.

Moss: For me, Peggy and Don will always be my favorite relationship on the show. I used to hear for so long, “Are they going to get together romantically or is it a father–daughter thing? Is it mentor–protégée? Are they enemies? Are they friends?” It’s all of those things.

Weiner: Eighty-five percent of our crew was there from the first season—despite all those hiatuses and unintended delays. This is a family. We’ve grown up together, and it was a place people came back to. It will always be home.

Beggs: We have pitched Matt a million different spinoff ideas, but we’re like the unsuccessful ad agency that never gets that account. He knows he’s got a masterpiece on his hands and probably isn’t interested in a derivative of it.

Weiner: I’m not interested. And I won’t budge on that. I love that this is it. If people are left wanting more, then you did your job right.

Mad Men returns Sunday, April 5, 10/9c, AMC.