'12 Monkeys' Spoilers, Premiere: Creators Share Reinvention of Brad Pitt's Character; Pilot Episode leads to Introduction of Big Mythology

By Staff Writer

Jan 23 2015, 08:11 AM EST

The pilot episode of 12 Monkeys, an adaptation from the same title 1995 movie of Terry Gilliam, got impressive records last Friday. In Live +3 data, the series is starring Aaron Stanford captured a total of 2.3 million viewers. This stat set phenomenal success for Syfy, but Can this science fiction drama can continue to climb up in the rating games?

In the 12 Monkeys' premier, the stats stated it glued 1.0M aged 18-49 viewers and 1.1 M audience in 25-54 bracket. Furthermore, it's more entertaining for men especially those aged between18-34 according to Zap2it. The hyped of the show that also features Kirk Acevedo (Ramse), Emily Hampshire (Jennifer Goines) and Tom Noonan (The Pallid Man), Noah Bean (Aaron Marker), and Amanda Schull (Dr. Cassandra Railly) can be rooted from the movie which gave Brad Pitt a Golden Globe Awards' best supporting actor trophy. But the show creators told otherwise.

12 Monkey's executive producers Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett admitted with their IGN interview their pressure. Fickett said that second episode is like a "re-pilot" thing.

"It went part and parcel with crafting and breaking the season. We knew once the pilot was finally brought down to its 42 minute running time that we had lost some of the story that we wanted to tell about the future and [characters like] Ramse and Jones and we had to reset some of that. So the second episode for us is really like we had to re-pilot in a lot of ways. It's sort of a two-part thing."

Incidentally Pitt's counterpart in the series is Emily Hampshire, who played Jennifer Goines, in the series. Both Fickett and Matalas believe that their recreation of the character, plus Hampshire's portrayal give different perspective. They also said that big picture are already spread out and they know how the show will end.

"We knew what the big mythology is. This season, in episode six, you hear about something called the Red Forest and we really start getting into what our big mythology is going to be. We just start to really shave off the tip of the iceberg and serve that up to the audience. But in order to make all those mysteries work, so you don't fall into a rabbit hole with an avalanche of mysteries you have to pay off, we had to work out the major arcs of the villain, the major mythology and where we want to end the show."