Twilight and Dexter Writer Melissa Rosenberg Talks Her New ABC Drama Red Widow

Melissa Rosenberg, who wrote on Dexter for the first four years and went on to pen the Twilight film franchise, has taken on her first series as a creator/showrunner with ABC's Red Widow.

Set to premiere on March 3, the show focuses on Marta (Radha Mitchell), a housewife whose criminal husband is murdered as a result of his involvement in stealing millions of dollars of cocaine from a gangster (Goran Visnjic), To protect her family (and perhaps enact some revenge along the way), Marta ends up taking up her husband’s criminal activities, with both fellow criminals and the FBI among her adversaries.

Rosenberg, Mitchell and Visnjic were on hand at this week's TCA (television critics association) tour to talk about the new series, and what audiences can expect from it.

"Marta Walraven is pretty much my dream character to play," Mitchell said. "I think Melissa wrote a woman who has a duality, which is very complex. She's a woman who is a housewife, who has been sort of avoiding her criminal upbringing by living the life of a soccer mom and is suddenly dragged into a world that she's been trying to avoid pretty much her whole life. And in the process she discovers things about herself and talents that she didn't know she had and becomes more and more compelled by the likes of Nicholae Schiller who is this evil, or maybe not so evil, drug lord in San Francisco."

"We've had on cable and then on network these male characters that are very flawed and complex, like Tony Soprano and Dexter and Vic Mackey," Rosenberg added. "And then we've just begun to have that on cable for women in the form of Edie Falco on Nurse Jackie and Weeds.  And now, I think this show is bringing that kind of a character to network.  It's a very tricky character to sell to an audience, because women are held to a higher standard."

"It's the same kind of an issue you're dealing with in the character of Dexter, who's a serial killer," the writer added. "How do you get an audience rooting for someone like that, and how do you get someone rooting for a mother who's making some really questionable moral decisions?"

Visnjic, who initially turned down the role, said the best moments for his character come beyond the pilot. "The first time Melissa and I talked about the character, there was a lot of promises of what's going to come, because in the pilot, I have only one scene," he said. "So it was a lot of belief in what Melissa's going to write afterwards.  And I have to say, from Episode 2 on, it was really fun to do all these things.  And the character is completely unusual, something I've never done before."

ABC ordered 8 episodes of the midseason show, as they did with Scandal. When asked if there were creative benefits to that timeframe and if she had started thinking about what's ahead in the future if they do get a 22 episode order, Rosenberg responded:

"When I first met with ABC about this, I had seen the Dutch series and said, 'This is network?'  I mean, if you've seen the "Penoza," it's very cablesque in its tone and its edge in terms of the characters and the moves that they make. I was wary because I said I don't want to pull back on the edge for this or the storytelling for cable. I also felt that because this is a very character‑driven show that it's not something that lends itself as well to 22 episodes. The one advantage that cable has over network, and it's nothing to do with censors or violence or sex or any of that.  It is time.  If you have time to write a good show and you have time to develop it, you get good storytelling.   So when we got midseason eight episodes, that's exactly what I wanted.  I had as much time to write and develop the show as I did on Dexter, which is three months going in, whereas a lot of network shows have maybe seven weeks."

One thing Rosenberg does promise, is that while they are writing with Season 2 in mind, people do die.

Red Widow premieres on March 3 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.

Source : ign[dot]com