AMC has become a leading cable brand when it comes to quality TV dramas, and with that higher profile comes the opportunity for greater fallout when the audience is disappointed. Viewers have expressed frustration that “Mad Men” is not back this summer. But at a news conference Thursday, Joel Stillerman, AMC senior vice president of original programming, assured TV critics that production on the 1960s drama will begin in a couple of weeks with a new season airing early in 2012.
Writers for AMC’s “The Killing” will regroup to plot the second season of that series in the next month, and Stillerman promised a resolution to the “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” question. He acknowledged that some viewers — mostly a few hysterical TV critics — were put off by the lack of resolution in the show’s first season.
“For everybody who was frustrated, we hear you,” Stillerman said, acknowledging that if he had to do it over the network would have taken a different approach to managing expectations about what was going to happen within that first season. “[The marketing] was never meant to mislead anyone.”
(For the record, “Killing” executive producer Veena Sud pretty much telegraphed there would be no resolution back in January when she said, “Whether or not it gets solved at the end of the season is a mystery.”)
AMC will launch a new drama Nov. 6: “Hell on Wheels,” a Western set during the building of the transcontinental railroad.
Set in post-Civil War America, “Hell on Wheels” follows railroad construction from the East, tracking multiple characters, including a greedy railroad entrepreneur (Colm Meany, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”); a Confederate soldier (Anson Mount) looking to avenge his wife’s death; an emancipated slave working on the railroad (Common); and a cartographer’s widow (Dominique McElligott).
Executive producers — and brothers — Joe and Tony Gayton said they were inspired by an “American Experience” documentary about the building of the railroad.
“One of the things that caught me is it’s just so American, the idea of a tent city that packs up and moves [as the railroad is built],” Tony Gayton said. “And it’s violent and gives rise to vice and gambling, but there are churches, too.”
Given the period and setting, some viewers’ minds immediately will go to the HBO Western “Deadwood,” but producers said they intend to find their own way, particularly when it comes to dialogue.
“The language in ‘Deadwood’ was very beautiful but very stylized,” Tony Gayton said. “We have a more natural way of getting dialogue in this one.”
