Mutant X Interviews: Howard Chaykin (11/01 SciFi Wire)
Sci-fi Wire 11/30/01: Howard Chaykin
Chaykin Muses on Mutant X
Just how surprised is Mutant X head writer and executive consultant Howard Chaykin by the success of the freshman genre show? "I'm not at all surprised," Chaykin told SCI FI Wire in an interview. "Come on! What do you want from my life? That's a horrible question."
Actually, it's not a horrible question. Plenty of shows debut poorly and die. Plenty of others start strong and then fade quickly. Mutant X--which centers on a group of mutants trying to protect their own kind from the government and other mutants--scored with its October premiere, and the series remains one of the top-rated shows in first-run syndication.
"I prepped the first three episodes, hands-on," said Chaykin, who has previously worked on Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and The Flash, and before entering the realm of television made his living as an award-winning comic-book and graphic-novel artist-writer. "I was [also] up there [in Montreal], I think, for a bit of the fourth. So I spent three weeks up in Canada at the beginning of the production. There are always honeymoons, schisms and problems, but I pretty much knew from the first days of shooting that we had something special going on. We had some nice chemistry between our actors. We had a nice look to the show, and things seemed to be coming together."
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