Brannon Braga and Adam Simon Talk ‘Salem’ Season Two and Expanding the World of the Series

Brannon Braga and Adam Simon Salem Season 2 Interview
Adam Simon and Brannon Braga at WonderCon 2015 (Photo by Richard Chavez)

Season two of WGN America’s chilling supernatural series Salem kicked off on April 5, 2015 for what series creators/executive producers Brannon Braga and Adam Simon confirm will be a season that’s much bigger in scope. “We got the chance to make the world bigger and bolder and go further, to show parts of this world we didn’t get to show last year – whether it’s going to Boston or to Indian country. Or, to explore literally sections of Salem that we couldn’t build or explore last year, like Knocker’s Hole, the really dark scary part of town. For one thing geographically and narratively it’s expanded.” explained Simon during our interview at the 2015 WonderCon in Anaheim, CA.

“And perhaps even more importantly, character-level. We’re bringing several new characters to the show this year. One, played by Lucy Lawless, who is a particular nasty witch – an ancient nasty witch who has never been able to accomplish what Mary (played by Janet Montgomery) has been able to do and wants what she has. And Stuart Townsend plays a Doctors Without Borders type who comes to town to help the people dying of plague, and several others,” added Braga.

As for what state John Alden (played by Shane West) will be in after the devastating events of season one, Braga says he’ll be in a bad place. “When we meet him, he’s shattered. You can really see he’s a shattered man having killed his own father to save Mary Sibley’s life, not knowing how badly manipulated into that he was, and having had to say farewell to Gloriana, the prostitute with the heart of gold who was the love of his life. At the same time, he’s like that classic Hitchcockian paranoid figure who believes something nobody else will believe: that there’s a witch war on and they’ve got to get back to Salem and yet they don’t let him get back there,” explained Simon. “The surprising thing with him this year is there’s a different kind of love journey that he and Anne Hale (played by Tamzin Merchant) are going to be on that’s going to prove to be every bit as star-crossed and epic, and maybe tragic and maybe not, as John and Mary’s love story in various ways. It’s a very different twist on the love story that goes on, with also interestingly supernatural implications given that she is at minimum the daughter of a witch and possibly discovering interesting powers of her own.”

Fans of Salem know that it’s a boundary-pushing series, but neither Simon nor Braga think about pushing those boundaries when they’re creating episodes. “The network has been great. If anything they’ve pushed us to go further but we’re conscious of not being gratuitous,” said Braga. “If anything, we just want to show things that you wouldn’t imagine in a horror. And we know the show’s working if we’re not sure you’re allowed to show it. ‘Are you allowed to show that bird that’s in the first episode? Are you allowed to show a nipple that’s on a thigh?’ I don’t know. That’s when we know the show is working.”

Simon and Braga say they’re influenced by classic movies and great TV shows, but that’s not where they get their inspiration for some of the more bizarre scenes in Salem. “The really mind-blowing things that you see, like the thigh nipple and the birds, the strangest kinds of magic are all the things we’ve actually found from things people believed,” said Simon.


In fact, Mary’s toad is right from the transcripts. “So many of these things are,” said Simon. “So part of it was just going, ‘Wow, let’s just go back to the amazing things people believed in the late 17th century.'”

“Which are stranger than any horror movie could ever be,” added Braga.

“And they’re not encumbered by all the rules that have grown up. We’ve seen 50,000 vampire movies or werewolf movies and we know you get yourself a bullet or a cross or your this or your that, and yet the actual things people were afraid of they weren’t safe that way. Part of what makes the show feel dangerous and unsafe is that it doesn’t play by the rules that built up in genre fiction. Instead it goes back to the things that we really believed,” said Simon.

– Also of interest: Interviews with Janet Montgomery and Shane West / WonderCon Photo Gallery

Watch the full interview for more on what Brannon Braga and Adam Simon had to say about season two of Salem: