Dana Gould, the creator of Stan Against Evil, wrote himself into a corner at the end of Season Two. After a season full of time travel, Stan and Evie return to the present day…
Dana Gould, the creator of Stan Against Evil, wrote himself into a corner at the end of Season Two. After a season full of time travel, Stan and Evie return to the present day only to find they never closed the portal to Hell. The land of the dead has overtaken the land of the living. It’s a fantastic cliffhanger to end a season on, but only if you know how you’re going to get out of it when the next one starts. Gould, we learned during the show’s panel at New York Comic Con, had no idea.
“Dana sent me a note between Seasons Two and Three because neither Janet (Varney) or I knew how he was gonna get himself out of the corner that he had painted himself into at the end of Season Two,” actor John C. McGinley said. “I asked, ‘how are you gonna get out of this,’ and of course he just said ‘I don’t know.’ Not that freakin’ reassuring. So he called me and said, ‘I do know this. Everything Stan has ever done has gone wrong… One thing Stan’s gonna have to do is change his whole approach to life. He’s gonna have to go against everything he’s ever done before. If he can. If he cares to and has the tools do. So that’s Stan’s arc in Season Three that Dana laid out, and it was really just beautiful.”
Janet Varney, Dana Gould – Photo Credit: Kim Simms/IFC
Gould spoke to us before the panel about how he got himself out of that in Season Three. “One thing I learned on The Simpsons was tell big stories little and tell little stories big. It was a really great lesson. So I sat down with this season and said, ‘well, they’re trapped in Hell.’ How do I tell that story in a small way? What’s the Twilight Zone episode here?” Gould said. “What I came up with was Stan and Evie are in their private ell. So Stan’s in his private Hell, and Evie’s in her private Hell. What would be Stan’s private Hell? Nobody listens to him. What would be Evie’s private Hell? She’s accused of Murder. So they both end up living through their private Hells.”
That story, which comprises the beginning of the season, lets Gould set up the rest of the season. We can expect the typical monster of the week style stories, but if you’re a fan of the show, you’ve noticed it’s become much more serialized after Season One. It sounds like that’s going to continue. “Stan thinks he has a way to end the curse in Willard’s Mill in one fell swoop. And it involves him allying himself with a demon. It’s a terrible idea. Like all brilliant ideas, it totally blows up in his face,” Gould said. “It’s based on the fact that the only way we won World War II was we allied with Stalin.”
John C. McGinley, Dana Gould, Janet Varney
Gould said this story allows him even more opportunities to do what he’s always tried to do with this show: Parody horror movies. And he has some good ones this season. “We have an X-Files episode, we have a total Kaiju fight, we have an evil puppets episode, a salute to Meet the Feebles, we have a Japanese ghost hospital movie. We take movies that we love and we’ll break them down. I write the first two episodes and then I arc out the season. Then I bring in the writers and we sit down and say, ‘I love the movie The Infection, which is a Japanese horror movie set in a hospital. So we’ll all watch The Infection and say ‘what’s the Stan Against Evil version of this?’”
They showed the Kaiju episode during the panel, and it’s silly in all the ways you want it to be. There are even two mystical twins played by the same actress. During the shoot, she learned her dialog wrong so the dubbing would be off when she recorded the lines later. It’s even funnier that the lines she’s dubbing over are also in English, they’re just entirely different lines. It’s a hilarious episode that leans into the way those old Kaiju movies were shot in the best way.
Barbara Ann Duff, Vera Duffy, John C. McGinley – Episode 303, Larva
As far as Stan episodes he’d like to do in the future, he has a ton of ideas. Every time Gould sees a horror movie, he has an idea for an episode. “We’ve never done a Paranormal Activity movie. Somehow, there’s gotta be some way to do, if not Planet of the Apes, Planet of the Something? There’s gotta be a chase through a cornfield. It’s gotta happen. Especially now with Season Four.”
That’s right. Season Three hasn’t even aired yet, and Gould is already talking about Season Four. He says Season Three really wraps of the first arc of Stan Against Evil. “I didn’t want to end up where I was stringing along this kind of threadbare mythology,” he said. “Let’s just end this part of it. We’ll solve this problem with another problem and we’ll go from there. If Stan Against Evil is a book, this is the end of Part One.”
If you’ve noticed that the scripts themselves found a lot more emotional moments in Season Two, that was Gould’s intent. While Season One felt very much like a sitcom with mostly standalone episodes, John C. McGinley found all these little emotional moments to humanize and redeem Stan. He’s not just an insensitive jackass, he’s a man dealing (or not dealing) with great personal tragedy. There’s a lot more of that in Seasons Two and Three. “It was the arc of the season. His journey to go back and get his wife is a dumb idea. It’s based on all this, you know, the butterfly effect… you can’t change time, time will correct itself. It’s a beautiful story and it’s true to the beat. The way John played it was dead on, it wasn’t too maudlin but you can’t skip it either. You can’t go, [he put on a William Shatner voice:] ‘Let’s get the devil out of here!’ It played true to the moment, and in Season Three, it gets in some places a lot sillier. I like the balance.”
John C. McGinley
McGinley also talked to us about the emotional work he brought to Stan. “The people on this show can all turn a joke… I don’t mean that to sound arrogant, but those chops we have. But what we really want to do is find out what makes these people tick. So when Dana puts that on the page, that’s meat. That’s a steak. It’s what we kind of live for. What makes Stan redeemable?”
It won’t surprise you to learn McGinley knows the exact answer to that question. “Loss,” he said. “Claire’s loss. The fact that he’s a wounded man. That he’s damaged and he has the spine to try and reconcile it instead of just going into the woods and licking his wounds. He still has a daughter to take care of, he still has a life to live… Stan’s loss of Claire and his complete refusal to accept her loss, in fact he travels through time to go get her and travels through time to go get Janet. Look, Stan’s a great antihero. He’ll do the right thing, but only in the bottom of the ninth if the bases are jacked, he’ll do the right thing just so he doesn’t have to frickin’ hear about it. That’s a great hero!”
That work McGinley did finding the humanity in Stan served him well when it came time for him and Claire to be onscreen together at the end of Season Two. He talked a bit about what prepared him for that moment. “Because that loss is the one event in Stan’s life… that’s defined him and it’s what’s impacted him the most. I, John McGinley know loss. Those two get married. Then when you step in front of the camera and bring that truth of Stan’s loss and John McGinley’s loss, it resonates.”
Stan Against Evil is still a sitcom, but unlike most sitcoms, the characters will continue to grow and change. McGinley gave us a hint about how that plays out in Season Three. “Dana decided that the only way for Stan to move forward, and Gerard Doucette tells him this, is everything you’ve done in your life, every decision you’ve made, every pragmatic point of view you’ve refused to come off of, every initiative you’ve ever taken has only led to loss and inadequacy.
