After five seasons on Falling Skies, Noah Wyle is putting his stamp on another genre franchise in Syfy’s supernatural series, The Librarians. Wyle first played Flynn Carsen, guardian of a repository of magic artefacts hidden under New York’s Metropolitan Public Library, in the 2004 TV movie The Librarian: Quest For The Spear. After two more movies and a six-year gap he signed on as a recurring cast member and executive producer of the spinoff series.
The Librarians’ first season earned accolades for its family-friendly mix of action and comedy. Yet, Wyle wasn’t satisfied, and believes Season 2 is a big improvement. “If I’m really honest, I look at that first season and I’m happy with about 60% of it. Then there was about 40% that I really felt we needed to smooth out and find our tone and our pace. That 60% is probably now up to 90%. I think the second season is a much better show and a lot closer to the type of show we want to be making.”
Working with The Librarians co-producers Dean Devlin and John Rogers allows Wyle to be “very hands on” with the development of the show. After helming an episode of Falling Skies, he’s taken that a step further this season in the director’s chair. “It was the first episode that we filmed even though it will be the fifth episode that we air so we were jumping right into the middle of our narrative and having to fill in the blanks of how we got to where we are,” Wyle explains.
Along with a team comprised of former candidates for his position and a counter-terrorism agent (played by Rebecca Romijn), Carsen spent Season One keeping the Library’s relics safe from Matt Frewer’s Serpent Brotherhood. The librarians will be weathering a different storm in Season 2, though, Wyle reveals. “Without giving too much away, Prospero, the wizard from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is brought to life and he raises a fictional army of some of the worst villains from the pages of literature to do battle against the librarians, which is a really fun conceit. So Flynn gets to tee off against Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein’s monster.”
Working with a team will also continue to be challenging for Carsen, says Wyle. “His best friend is a sword and he’s dealing with magic constantly so he lives between two worlds. He’s got a sort of eccentricity and irreverence about him that makes him frustrating if you’re his girlfriend and makes him really fun if you’re not.”
Regardless of where conflict comes from though, The Librarians’ second season will uphold the qualities that made Season 1 spellbinding, Wyle promises. “We try to infuse a little bit of real mythology and real history in every episode but I think the underlying ethos – that these characters are successful because of their intelligence and their resourcefulness – is ultimately positive. The fact that it’s kind of irreverent and silly is what sets us apart.”
The Librarians Season 2 will air from 2 November in the UK at 8pm on Syfy. For more news on the biggest TV shows, pick up the latest issue of SciFiNow.
