The WB’s spooky drama is about a small town where life is but a scream

SCREAM TEAM Montgomery and Cahill dig for ”Glory”’s secrets Glory Days Photograph by Chris McPherson

There’s always something scary about a Kevin Williamson project, be it a rash of sliced-up teens, a meat-hook-wielding fisherman, or a hyper-verbal film geek named Dawson. But right now the scariest thing about ”Glory Days,” the ”Scream” creator’s newest series for the WB (premiering Jan. 16), is the abominable weather. We’re on the set in the dead of a Vancouver winter; raindrops keep falling on the actors’ heads, and ”oh look, the space heater caught that gal’s nylon parka on fire” mishaps abound, but the cameras continue to roll.

”I’ve never been so consistently cold for so long in my life,” complains costar Poppy Montgomery (best known for her acclaimed turn as Marilyn Monroe in last year’s CBS miniseries ”Blonde”). Adds frost-nipped costar Jay R. Ferguson (”The In Crowd”): ”They get rain, wind, and snow all at the same time. I’ve never been in anything like this before.”

Funny, neither has The WB. Eager to stave off a bitter ratings chill — UPN’s now ahead of the Frog net as the fifth most-watched network — the home of angsty sudsers like ”Felicity” and ”Dawson’s Creek” is looking to heat things up with ”Glory,” a ”Northern Exposure”-cum-”X-Files” murder mystery for the MTV crowd.

The story unfolds when washed-up novelist Mike Dolan (”Friends”’ Eddie Cahill) returns home to Glory, a place where ”weird’s gone on overtime” thanks to a disturbing rash of pranks, break-ins, and bizarre murders. Eager to find the truth behind his dad’s ”accidental” death, Mike teams with comely coroner Ellie (Montgomery) and inexperienced sheriff Rudy (Ferguson) to solve the many mysteries of his eerie island — and, the WB hopes, to create a franchise that young men will actually watch. ”Look at the success of ‘CSI’ and how it skews younger,” says WB Entertainment president Jordan Levin. ”We definitely want to play an edge.”

And who better to help the WB than Williamson, who gave the netlet instant success with ”Dawson’s” in 1998 and who single-handedly created the slasher-satire genre with films like ”Scream” and ”I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Williamson took a stormy chapter from his own life to tell the story of Dolan, whose so-called fictitious book about Glory Island (which, among other things, suggests that Papa Dolan was offed and that Sheriff Rudy is gay) hits too close to home for family and friends.

”Dawson’s’ was autobiographical, and I exposed things in the story lines that I got flak for — things about my family that people saw,” Williamson recalls. ”I’d change the names and sometimes the outcomes, but you still hear about it. If I were dating someone and we got into a big fight, Dawson and Joey would get into a fight in the same manner.”

Dealing with ticked-off family and friends is definitely scary, but Williamson did not envision ”Glory” as a thriller when he pitched it to the WB last spring. Still, after filming the original pilot — a dramedy about Dolan’s struggle to reconcile with Glory’s townsfolk (featuring a cameo by Kirstie Alley as his agent) — WB execs decided ”Glory” needed less young-adult agita and more fear factor.

”Introducing the murder-mystery franchise was a direct response to our fear that another serialized drama was risky in this economic environment, [because] they’re harder to repeat and have become more costly,” says Levin. ”Mysteries are a durable programming genre throughout the history of TV. This was the one available genre that no one has introduced to a younger audience.”

So, out went the lighthearted tone and sunny locale (production was moved from Southern California to perma-overcast Vancouver); in came Dad’s mysterious death and Ellie the kooky coroner, who keeps dead bodies in her garden to study how they decompose. Williamson, meanwhile, understood the need for the creepy overhaul. ”It would have become a soap opera real quick,” he admits of ”Glory”’s first draft. ”I’ve done a few R movies, I’ve done ‘Dawson’s,’ but I’ve never done a possessed-kid story. There’s something new about this for me.”

The same can be said for ”Glory”’s sexy star. This is Cahill’s first leading role after appearing last season as Rachel’s shaggy-haired boy toy, Tag, on ”Friends” (a part that ”Smallville”’s Tom Welling auditioned for before he was cast as the Teen of Steel for the WB). Though Cahill had previously guested on ”Sex and the City” and ”Felicity,” ”Friends” was ”baptism by fire. [It was] six megastars and me sitting in a room. I’m going, ‘I’m either dreaming, or I’m getting fired,”’ says Cahill, who now costars with ”Titanic”’s Frances Fisher (as Dolan’s mom) and ”Black Widow”’s Theresa Russell (as the misunderstood town tramp). ”This is a whole different thing. It’s worth it, but it’s a challenge. I anticipate keeping a healthy head about it and pray that I have the strength to do so. It can be a mother.”

Williamson certainly knows something about pressure. After pumping out ”Scream,” ”Summer,” and ”Dawson’s” between 1996 and 1998, Williamson became Hollywood’s newest It Boy — a position that provided him with a landslide of offers, none of which he wanted to turn down. By 1999, he found himself directing his first movie, ”Teaching Mrs. Tingle,” executive-producing and rewriting ”Halloween: H20,” developing and launching ”Wasteland for ABC,” and finishing up the second season of ”Dawson’s” — all at the same time.

”It’s what I call my insane period,” Williamson recalls. ”I wasn’t given the tools and the skills to survive Hollywood, and I think I stumbled a little bit. You’re scared the shoe will drop off the other foot and you’re just gonna go away. I lived in total fear. I did not know how to say no.”

”I worked so much, I didn’t have any personal life,” he continues. ”It’s the classic story: What are you working for? I had a great home that I didn’t see. I was sleeping on the floor with no pillow so I wouldn’t sleep, so I would wake up every few hours and go back to the computer. That’s insane! But I had deadlines. I was self-destructing. There’s no way anybody could have met the timelines that I had, but I kept trying. I fell apart.”

Relief came when ”Wasteland” was canceled after only three episodes, and Williamson took a much-needed year off to sleep and reacquaint himself with a ”long-ignored personal life.” Old habits die hard, however: The writer still has a romantic comedy in development at Universal and a serial-killer series in the works at HBO. For now, though, Williamson is keeping those projects on the back burner so he can give ”Glory” his best shot.

”We’ve had great luck doing follow-up shows with some of our creators, whether it’s ['7th Heaven''s] Aaron Spelling on ‘Charmed’ or ['Buffy''s] Joss Whedon on ‘Angel,”’ says Levin. ”These people provide a foundation of trust to build on — and that really helps us a lot.” So if ”Glory” becomes a ”Dawson’s”-size hit, is Williamson in any danger of repeating his sleep-deprived, multitasking, the-floor-is-my-pillow high jinks? The scribe’s blood runs cold at the thought: ”I’ve learned how to put a big ol’ dead bolt on my door.”

Source: EW.com