Sexy vampires. Likable outlaws. A heist gone wrong, and a crusading lawman with a score to settle. Many a television series has been draped from these plot devices over the years. Some have become hits, others barely saw the light of day. Few, if any, arrived with a network built specifically for the kind of audience that would watch it.
That is the plum slot in which “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series” finds itself. Based on the 1996 film directed by Robert Rodriguez, the 10-episode action series makes its debut tonight at 9pm on the cable channel El Rey.
Rodriguez, a man best known for directing a diverse range of films, from Sin City (and its upcoming sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For) to the Spy Kids franchise, founded El Rey with the vision of appealing to second- and third-generation, largely English-speaking Hispanics in the 18-49 age demographic.
“We wanted to cater towards a male demographic at first, because they had limited choices in this arena,” Rodriguez said. “Maybe I should say, men and kick-ass females, from 18-49… millennials, leaning toward Hispanic as well. All of that. We wanted… to see what range of an audience we can bring.”
Although it launched December 2013, you may not have heard of El Rey. But if “Dusk” makes the kind of noise that Rodriguez believes that it will, the burgeoning channel may soon occupy a few slots on your DVR list of recordings, especially if you happen to be a particular type of film fan.
Meaning, the kind of fan who would happily surrender hours of his or her day to a marathon of Sonny Chiba films. Or one who would cry out with glee upon finding, say, Switchblade Sisters while channel surfing. Those viewers made the film version of From Dusk Till Dawn a cult classic, and could become the perfect evangelists for the series.
They’re also the sort of people who can appreciate the campy brilliance of casting Don Johnson as a Texas Ranger, and Wilmer Valderrama as a crime kingpin.
“Film lovers and people who love cool, kickass stuff should really come to the network and feel like they’re treated like a king,” he continued. “Like, you turn on your TV, and everything you could possibly want is right there. And you don’t even have to change the channel – personalities have curated it to actually be [about] things that they say is cool. You’re not going to be asking, ‘Why am I watching this?’ It’ll all make sense.”
We sat down with Rodriguez recently to talk about his vision for El Rey and how “Dusk” could infuse new blood into the vampire genre on television.
IMDb: Are you going to do something along the line of what Robert Osborne does with Turner Classic Movies and have curators and hosts?
Rodriguez: We’ll have introductions for some of our movies, for sure. They won’t be quite as stiff. But they most certainly will be about passion and what moves people. I’m going to be introducing some, Bob Orci, Harry Knowles, and we have a bunch of other guests we haven’t announced yet, but they’ll be introducing their favorite films.
IMDb: Can you tease me with just one?
Rodriguez: Ha. No, we’ll probably be saving that for another announcement. But other people, you can probably figure it out.
IMDb: Maybe somebody whose name starts with a Q?
Rodriguez: Possibly. There’s a long list of different people. But this is fun, as it grows, there’s already so much great content out there that we already have, and that we will get as the windows open up on that content later.
IMDb: You talked about expanding the mythology of From the Dusk Till Dawn. But this TV show is arriving at time when, in popular culture, vampires have just about come and gone in popularity. Now everything is about zombies. What does this show bring that’s new to a trend that people are saying is fading out? What’s left that this show is going to cater to that hasn’t been seen recently?
Rodriguez: One, this show has the best characters in the world. So you come for the characters first. They’re great: The Gecko Brothers, Santanico, Earl McGraw…all of the Fuller family. You’re just into it for them. But then you’ll realize there’s this whole thing that’s being built up, that’s much different from the movie.
I did a lot Aztec and Mayan research for the original film, trying to find an actual cult that existed that could have been vampire-like, that would have had traditional vampires. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff there. So I put pieces of it in the movie, but we just had traditional monster makeup and we didn’t really get to explore it and didn’t have a story built around it. This time we’re getting to go in there and delve into something that has much more authenticity and is different than anything anyone has ever seen. I’m excited about that difference…I don’t even know if we could even call them vampires, I don’t want confuse people by calling them something else. But they’re not traditional vampires.
IMDb: The other big vampire franchise I can think of that’s very seminal on TV, particularly for millennials, is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. You and Joss Whedon have something in common, in that he wrote the movie script….
(Rodriguez starts laughing.)
IMDb: …and then he created the series. However, he didn’t direct it –
Rodriguez: Yep.
IMDb: –so it ended up being exactly what he didn’t want to do.
Rodriguez: Yes.
IMDb: Then he went back to do the series, and it became this epic, inter-generationally affecting work. One of the benefits, and the main differences, between that and this series is that you directed the original work and now you’re returning to it and expanding on it. But what are other things with this series that you’ll be able to take to a different level for the television medium?
Rodriguez: Part of it was knowing how high we had set the bar originally. We cast George Clooney and Salma Hayek, and other stars for that. We wouldn’t settle for anything less than amazing casting of this to bring these characters to life, because they’re really rich, fantastic characters. And then the mythology that we wanted to delve into, in order to re-tell the story in a way that set us up to sustain it for future seasons. It had to be extremely intricate, evolved and rich. That’s what was cool about exploring Hispanic themes, is that it’s untouched. It’s just sitting there, waiting to be explored. It’s new! Nobody’s even thought to make anything like this before. It’s just ours to go and make it our own.
That’s exciting, to create a world that’s going to be all about exploring themes, ideas and story elements that nobody’s seen before because no one’s thought in that direction. They just repetitively imitate other versions of it but not do anything really new.
IMDb: A few years ago, the networks tried and failed to expand telenovelas to an American audience. This might seem like a silly question, but is that something you could see El Rey putting its own spin on and doing for the network? I ask because when the average American viewer thinks about Hispanic television, it’s one of the first things that come to mind.
Rodriguez: Right. They think about the Spanish counterpart. But I think what we want to invent is something completely new, something that anybody can watch and not even realize it has a Hispanic touch to it. People are surprised to realize, sometimes, that Spy Kids is actually a Hispanic film, because it doesn’t seem like it. But it is. It’s just so mainstream, and it taps into a universal quality. That’s what we want to do. I think if we just looked at Spanish television and said, “Let’s just adapt that to English!” we’d fail, just like if we took “CSI” and said, “Let’s do the Hispanic ‘CSI’,” we’d fail. So it has to be completely new, and it has to feel mainstream and original, and not feel like it’s translated.
In general, we always knew that wasn’t the key. We have to make something for everybody.
“From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series” premieres at 9pm Tuesday, March 11, on El Rey.