After being approached by MTV with the idea of rebooting Teen Wolf, series creator Jeff Davis said he watched the original 1985 movie starring Michael J. Fox. Knowing the network was hoping to enter the scripted market with a big series, he wondered what tone they were hoping to strike. Did they really want a TV show about basketball inspired by the “dated” film?
Davis found inspiration in The Lost Boys and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hoping to be “sexy, suspenseful, scary and funny,” he detailed. “I mostly was only interested in doing it if it could also have a sense of humor and jokes, or, at least, have a sense of irony. And not be so utterly serious like all the other teen shows that were coming out at that point.”
Before writing the pilot, Davis also read the first two Twilight books. While he understood why teenage girls—MTV’s desired demographic—was into it, he found the story “melodramatic.” For Teen Wolf, he wanted the audience to “be laughing one minute and then scared s–tless the next.”
Still, MTV had one major note when they read the pilot script: “‘There needs to be more sexiness. Every single scene must be oozing with sex,'” he recalled. “I’m sitting there thinking to myself, ‘Do you want the scene with Scott and his mom to be oozing with sex?!’ Every single scene?!’ But they were like, ‘This is how we draw an audience.'”
As he recalled, “I remember seeing the first trailer and thinking to myself, ‘OK so, they’re selling it just like Twilight. We’re f–ked.'”
Thankfully, he was wrong.
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