A Season 2 Conversation with Justin Haythe & Erwin Stoff from ‘The Serpent Queen’

Key Art for Season 2 of ‘The Serpent Queen’ Courtesy of STARZ.

The hit STARZ series, The Serpent Queen, returns to the airwaves on Friday, July 12, 2024, and to celebrate its return, we here at NTG sat down with the show’s creator/showrunner and its executive producer, Justin Haythe and Erwin Stoff, respectively, to discuss the season ahead.
​
John Betancourt: Gentlemen, congratulations on a second season, and thank you for your time today. First and foremost, would love to start with getting to know what went into the decision to make an already bold show even bolder and bigger in season two.
 
Justin Haythe: Look the tone. The show is all about the tone, right? And I think tone is one of those the most important things when you're telling a story and often not talked about because it's a way to angle the show. And I think that working on a season one, you learn a language, you develop collaborations, and you test the concept, and when you see this tone works, when you see the humor can coexist with the blood and the pathos. You're obligation free, you can push it farther. And it's always about pushing as far as you can go before, before it goes too far.
 
Erwin Stoff: I mean, you have to go bigger and bolder, otherwise, why bother doing a second season?
 
John Betancourt: Obviously, there have to be some challenges that come into play when you're assembling a season that's so much more ambitious. I'm curious as to what kind of challenges each of you ran into in doing so.
 
Erwin Stoff: The challenges are, it's funny. The challenge is, on the one hand, you want to give the audience what they liked last year, but then you don't want to repeat what you did last year. So, you sort of go with the story, which is okay, they loved Catherine, they loved that character, etc. Now in, sort of in, taking the story forward. what were all of the additional complications in her life? Well, she had children. Well, the religious wars were, you know, were beginning to happen and so on. So that's what causes it to, you know, to sort of AMP up further.
 
Justin Haythe: Well, I think, you know, the genre of television, you come back to feel a little bit like you felt last week, but if you feel exactly the way you felt last week, there's no point right to Erwin's point. But I would say the same thing about any character, a non-growing, non-developing character isn't interesting. And Catherine is the character who's changing. So, when season two, you come back to see who she was, what made her she was, but you also see where she's going and the new line, she's willing to cross. And in that sense, what remains interesting is what remains interesting about the characters.
 
John Betancourt: It could be said that this isn’t a hard philosophical show, because it's just telling history, so we can't really pull philosophy from that, but I will say that it is definitely about the human condition and a lot of the choices that we make. And I'm curious what kind of the underlying theme you hope the audience takes away in season two?
 
Justin Haythe: I mean, I would disagree with you slightly. I think you can take a philosophy by the frame you look at history through, and me, if there's a theme to this show, it's about the impact of arbitrary power systems, meaning you don't win this game by being the smartest, the best person, the kindest. That's not how you win this game. You win this game by being closest to who we've decided God picked to be king. So, under that system, Anything's fair game, right? It's not a fair system. So, you can lie and cheat and steal to win. And the question is, how often do we live under systems like that? When do people still lose faith in the system today? When are people feeling that way, and it's delicious to watch people behave where there are no rules. That's also pretty scary.
 
John Betancourt: Then I stand corrected. We can find philosophy here. Last question I have for you today, what has the response to the series meant to each of you?
 
Erwin Stoff: It's highly gratifying. Justin and I enjoyed the show. Justin and I have been friends and have worked together for well over 20 years. So, we actually had the greatest time. It was hard work, but we had the best time. So, to see other to see audiences having the response to it that they do, is obviously incredibly gratifying.
 
Justin Haythe: I couldn't agree with Erwin more. I mean, look, you wouldn't want to be in a foxhole with anybody else. Erwin, and I have known each other so long, anything that goes wrong, we've been there, and we've seen worse. But the real pleasure of it is to see that what amuses us, right, amuses other people as well.
 
Erwin Stoff: Yeah, that’s absolutely right.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

---