These 'Librarians' keep more than books safe
Excalibur is one of many legendary stars of TNT's new action-adventure series The Librarians, but these aren't your everyday knights of the round table.
The throwback world of its popular movie franchise has spawned a new fantasy/sci-fi/comedy mash-up series debuting Sunday (8 p.m. ET/PT) from executive producers Dean Devlin, John Rogers and Noah Wyle.
The 10-episode first season is "the pulp show that if I were 12 I would lose my mind for," says Rogers.
In the Librarian films, Wyle (ER) starred as Flynn Carsen, who worked for an ancient organization housed under the Metropolitan Public Library, protecting important artifacts such as the Ark of the Covenant and the Spear of Destiny from bad guys.
Flynn appears here and there on the show (due to Wyle's commitments on his other TNT show, Falling Skies), but in the premiere he hands the Librarian reins to four newcomers: buttoned-up counterterrorism agent Eve Baird (Rebecca Romijn), brainy and brawny Jake Stone (Christian Kane), young criminal Ezekiel Jones (Australian newcomer John Kim) and the gifted yet troubled Cassandra Cillian (Lindy Booth).
Bob Newhart and Jane Curtin reprise their roles from the films, and John Larroquette is the new group's caretaker from the Library's Portland office.
The Librarians kicks off with Flynn and the foursome keeping King Arthur's crown from the Serpent Brotherhood, and other episodes visit haunted houses and labyrinths and take on legends, mysteries and myths from dragons to Santa Claus.
"The fun of each episode is us explaining it and filling in the gaps and often putting our own odd little twist on it," Rogers says. "This is a show that bounces from Nikola Tesla's lost experiments of World War I to a book that makes fairy tales come real. Not a lot of shows have that range."
All the episodes boast throwback titles — such as "And the Fables of Doom" — and the creators broke out the job descriptions of classic characters such as Doc Savage and The Saint to find those who could read temple walls or whip up some math and science when the need arises.
Eve, a different take on the action hero, is chosen as the Librarians' protecting Guardian, but the military woman initially doesn't believe in magic.
"She's sort of the voice of the audience and the skeptic of the group, which kinda makes her the straight man to everybody's comedy," says Romijn, who signed on after Wyle explained to her that Flynn was "Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones was played by Don Knotts."
The straitlaced Eve has issues early on with Ezekiel, a young punk take on the gentleman thief. Outfitted with high-tech goggles, he's Kim's own cheekiness combined with Houdini swagger.
Kim admits that he took Excalibur for a spin anytime he could. "If Ezekiel and I share one quality, we're both a little curious for our own good, and if there's a sign that says, 'Do not touch,' we'll turn a blind eye to that."
Booth considers Cassandra's abilities from synesthesia — a condition that ties senses to memory retrieval — due to a brain tumor as a curse, but it's Flynn who teaches the science-genius janitor that she can use them to help save the world.
Playing someone ridiculously intelligent was difficult, Booth says. "I would go home every night and I'd be learning my lines, and I would Google every other word trying to understand the concepts of fourth-dimensional geometry just so I could get the words out and make them as easily understandable as I could."
She often commiserated with Kane, whose character also has a very high IQ but tends to hide it and his art-and-culture bent working on an Oklahoma oil pipeline.
Kane feels that a lot of Jake, an archaeologist archetype who Rogers says is "actually kind of a homebound redneck," is patterned after himself — for example, the actor was an art-history major for a time at the University of Oklahoma.
"So I actually get to be from Oklahoma and I get to talk the way I talk," Kane says. Jake's been hiding his smarts his whole life, and then all of a sudden he's "around these other misfit toys who are the same, and it's an awakening for that character: Wait, it's OK to be who I am."
Romijn says The Librarians has a similar tone as The Wonderful World of Disney movies she grew up watching on Sunday nights — "That was appointment television for when I was a kid" — and Rogers hopes enough families tune in so there's a second season to work on the rest of the legends left on their idea wall in the writers' room.
"The selfie of Dorian Gray sat on that wall for the entire season waiting for us to figure out how to do it," Rogers says. "There is a way to do that, and I want to take a shot at it."