How would you like to be the brother of one of the writers of a hit TV show? Well, our own Pat Dunn is such a person. His brother, Jim Dunn, is a writer and producer of the hit SY-FY series, “Haven”, which begins its second season this Friday night.
Jim was in town recently visiting with his brother’s family, and he talked about the series with us. Even though it was not assured that the network would pick up a second season, there was an ending for the first 13 episodes that made it possible to contract for the series again.
“We did 13 for the first season and coming back for the second season they asked us to prepare budgets for 13, 20 and 26, but they finally went with 13. We’ll see what happens next year,” said Dunn.
He was asked how much input he had once the filming started.
“I’m an Executive Producer which in Hollywood, a Producer can mean anything, but in television, the writers are producers. We do everything: conceive the whole season, conceive the characters, we outline stories and write the scripts. Being it TV, we usually have six or seven days to shoot an episode. Weather comes up, we lose a prop – any number of things can happen so we’re usually rewriting the episode while it’s being filmed to accommodate either production problems or story changes that the network decided they want at the last minute.”
The star of the series is Emily Rose, who plays Audrey Parker, an FBI Agent. After she arrived in Haven, she suddenly became aware of a paranormal force. As the first 13 episodes ended, she had found a link to the mother she has never known. Jim talked about Emily Rose.
“She is really nice and we’re really lucky. I’ve talked with other people who work in TV who have problems with their actors. There’s sort of this strange feud with writers and actors because they both want to tell the other one what to do, but we’re lucky. All of our actors are great. They’re all really nice people. They’re very genuine human beings.”
We’ll hear more from Jim throughout the week as we get closer to the second season premier.