The witches are real in new supernatural drama
WGN America flies into crowded field of original scripted content with Salem
SHREVEPORT, LA.— A woodsy stretch of Willow Lake Farm, just outside this city, has been painstakingly built to look like a 17th-century New England village, filled with shops and houses with steep-pitched roofs and drab clapboard exteriors.
Milling about nearby are women in elaborate capes and cinched dresses, and men clad in peasant shirts and heavy coats.
It’s all textbook quaint — until you see the towering gallows at the centre of town.
This is the setting for Salem, the new TV series from Tribune Co.’s WGN America set in the Massachusetts village that was the scene of notorious Colonial witch trials.
In Canada, it debuts on Space on Sunday at 10 p.m.
The show itself will be a trial of sorts for WGN America.
With Salem, the Chicago network is entering the increasingly crowded field of original content.
The new show will run Sundays, the most hotly contested night in television because of shows such as HBO’s Game of Thrones, CBS’s The Good Wife and AMC’s Mad Men. Salem must also stand out from a host of other programs with the supernatural or witches at their narrative centre.
All this is not lost on Peter Liguori, the chief executive of Tribune Co. Liguori says Salem is simply the opening act in transforming the struggling media company into a profitable TV-centric enterprise.
“This is step one,” Liguori said. “We are by far and away no FX. We are no AMC. We are no HBO.” The company has more than witches waiting in the wings. Other original scripted series ordered by WGN America include Manhattan, a period piece set in Los Alamos, N.M., that dramatizes the Manhattan Project scientists racing to build the first atomic bomb.
Salem, which was originally developed for FX, places a twist on the infamous Massachusetts trials. In a departure from the history books, the supernatural drama posits there was good reason for the hysteria: the witches were real and they were running the trials.
“Knowing that the horror drama and supernatural drama is a genre that’s thriving and the audience seems to have an appetite for is important because it can do some of the heavy lifting for us in terms of drawing audience to the network,” said Matt Cherniss, president and general manager of WGN America and Tribune Studios.
Of course, the real test will be whether there remains an enthusiasm for witches on TV. Salem is among a spate of recent programs with prominent witches: FX’s American Horror Story: Coven, Lifetime’s The Witches of East End, HBO’s True Blood, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time.