MZP: Okay, most obvious question first – why Connor? He was never all that popular on the show (largely due to some misguided plots, admittedly), so he’s an odd choice for your show’s hero to many.

Michael Jay: A lot of people looked at Connor and saw a soppy, whiny little brat. And they were right. I just saw unrealized potential. I always said that Angel himself was much more interesting when he wasn’t around Buffy. Within BtVS, he was Buffy’s love interest and everything about him played into that. That’s how I felt about Connor. He was a protagonist that was meant to be a source of conflict for the lead protagonist. That’s a hard thing to pull off and it was pretty hit and miss during his stint on Angel. I saw a kid stuck in the shadow of his father and wanting to be his own man, but he can’t because he’s in the family business, so to speak. That’s a classic story to tell.

MZP: Connor feels like the spiritual successor to Angel in many ways – it retains the LA setting, several of the show’s characters, concepts, villains and locations show up again, events from Angel (particularly Season Five) are referenced throughout and there’s a real sense of torch-passing from father to son as a result. What made you want to approach the show this way instead of spearing off in a new direction right away (i.e. as we did with Faith)?

Michael Jay: It was readily apparent almost from her first appearance that Faith as a character could carry her own show. She had a similar path to Angel with the whole redemption kick, but there was a story there. Connor wasn’t that. He was more or less a plot device for Angel and all of his characterization was treated as such, as a source for Angel’s personal development. I never felt like he was a real person and thus there was no way he was going to be a leading male in his own series. Angel himself had 200 years of history to dig into and the whole Angelus thing nagging at him. With Connor, I felt like I had the fake memories of the Reillys and that was it. So I was cognizant of that and thought that nobody would be remotely interested in reading the movies or the show if it was a completely fresh start, new characters, new settings, new everything. He wasn’t a compelling enough character to carry that load. So it was either go with new characters (for the main cast) and keep the setting or vice versa. I can get a lot more mileage out of characters than a place, so that was the decision.

MZP: What are your thoughts on recycling existing Angel characters and situations e.g. Wolfram & Hart within your show? Did you worry it could harm the identity of Connor while it was still establishing itself (as arguably the first season of Slayer Academy suffered from at times), or was it a purposeful move to ground the show in established events and make it more of a sequel to Angel than a spin-off?

Michael Jay: Not really because there was no identity. Connor is an extension of his father, from the night he was conceived (in season 2 of Angel when he slept with Darla specifically to lose his soul) to his birth to Quor’toth… everything was about how Connor affected Angel’s life. So my approach was Connor trying desperately to get away from that and be his own man and continuously getting sucked back in. I felt like that was the story to tell with this character as opposed to moving him to a different city and getting mixed up in trouble. That just didn’t feel organic.

MZP: Throughout the seasons and movies so far, the core cast has remained small and constant, with our first new addition scheduled for Season Three. What was your thought process behind that? Do you prefer shows with tight, focused casts? What avenues and challenges does it present in terms of plotting and keeping them interesting?

Michael Jay: I most definitely prefer smaller casts, primarily because it’s easier to have your characters fall into cliché, two dimensional roles when they are a lot of them. You’re more likely to only use them in scenes that benefit their specific skill set (like the computer nerd is only in a scene when we need some techno babble) because there are so many people to service in a limited number of pages. With a smaller cast, if I need some sort of plot point, I look to them. And by consistently having them in different situations, it rounds them out.

The only time it really presented a problem was with Kaia in season two when she was, ahem, physically limited for awhile, but even that opened up avenues to explore. I’m never really at a loss for what to do with my cast. If anything, I have too many ideas and have to temper them down. A lot gets left on the cutting room floor because of the length of the seasons and I really wanted these people to be men & women of action. As in, you learn about them through what they do and what they aren’t saying as opposed to what they are saying.

MZP: Also on the cast, what were your thoughts behind the characteristics and skill sets of the various players? Did you identify needs within the team based on the stories you wanted to tell, or did it work the other way around?

Michael Jay: Connor’s not a leader in the slightest, so the big focus was to have character that have really lived and had life experiences. Buffy’s whole cast sort of grew just from being around her and so did Angel’s. Connor is very much the little brother in this cast and a lot of the concepts stemmed from familial relationships I’ve observed in my family. Pike’s personality is a near direct lift from my older brother. Gabriella’s a bit of a know it all. Kaia’s the stoic, free spirit. And so on. Joss Whedon once said that all of his shows are about “created” families and I wanted to stick to that mantra here.

As far as shaping them, I identified what traits Connor either needed or needed around him. Then I went through and combined them and tried to have as much variety as possible. Pike’s city boy stoicism and laid back nature isn’t the sort of personality you associate with a gun enthusiast. I think by merging archetypes into one character, you end up with an actual person, not a piece of wood you can describe in two words.

I will admit to making a change after I laid out ideas for the first season. Kaia originally wasn’t a werewolf. There was a 5th regular named Cesar that was meant for that role, but Kaia was this vapid bitch character who really only existed as Pike’s girlfriend and I hated that. So I scrapped that concept when I laid out the season and saw I had nothing substantial and meaty for her and merged the two characters. Thus far I think it’s worked out splendidly.

MZP: One aspect of your writing you’re often commended on is your attention to detail, seeding plot threads and beats in earlier episodes to play out later in the season, which lends Connor a more serialized edge. Is this how you like to work, and did you always plan the show to be a focused arc season by season rather than a collection of standalones?

Michael Jay: What really ends up happening is I’m very very lazy. I hate constantly coming up with new characters and situations to draw on. Other writers, when they need to fill a void that a regular can’t fill, will go the route of creating a new character for that spot and I’ve seen that lead to problems over and over again. You feel this urge to come up with more for that character to do and create backstories and all that crap that just takes away from your main arcs and your main cast. Let that happen several times over the course of two seasons and you’ve got a pretty bloated narrative and cast list.

I just like to recycle. If there’s an opening to reuse a character or a scenario and expand it and make it more integral to the main arc, then I’ll do that before going in a fresh direction. The constant back referencing helps my attention to detail as well. I’m more likely to remember if I keep reminding myself. So the show sort of evolved into being a serial via that process. When I lay out a plot or conceive a character, I just ask myself if the potential is there for multiple usages. I think it also aids the notion that everything on this show is important. Even seemingly throwaway standalones plots have relevance down the line.

MZP: Also on serialization, to readers with less than stellar memories like myself and your style of not going back and re-explaining past plot points to the audience when they rear up again, this sometimes makes the more deeply-seeded plots a little hard to follow. Being able to flick back and check at will certainly helps, but are you ever conscious of not stopping to reiterate your plot points? Do you believe the audience should keep up without you having to spoon feed them?

Michael Jay: I didn’t really find my audience for Connor until right around Connor 2, so that was an honest mistake. I took for granted that not everyone would have my memory and capacity to recall all these things. As people starting reading and making comments to that extent, I’ve taken it on board and moving forward, I will be better about putting in little reminders of the past.

MZP: Your movie events always seem to shake up the status quo of Connor ahead of each new season. What made you want to tackle these big, game-changing situations in their own format as opposed to within the bounds of the series?

Michael Jay: The movies, more often than not, are arc ideas I had that I knew couldn’t be expanded into a full season. They’re the “the cast gets to kick some ass” ideas that are fairly thin on the plot end of things, but would be fun to write. I’m still working on how to effectively plot a movie to have the maximum impact. I’ve got two more tries to get it right with these characters.

MZP: You’ve expanded heavily on werewolf culture in Connor, to the extent that they’re now more readily identified with the show than vampires (especially following Hounds of God).

Michael Jay: Yep. Vampires are a bit played to me, so I stay away from them and when I do use them, they’re easily dispatched.

MZP: Hounds of God was the first of the movies to really hit an epic, not-for-TV kind of scale. Did you want it to be a bigger event, or did the other two end up feeling more like TV movies for other reasons?

Michael Jay: Again, this goes back to the not really finding my audience until late in the game point. I don’t watch a lot of television movies, so I don’t really have a concept of the difference between that and a feature film. As people have pointed out the differences, Hounds of God was a concerted effort to work out those kinks and present something on a larger scale. I guess I didn’t really get that the movies had to be bigger in scale than the series, given I don’t really work with a budget on the series. Now I get that and I’ll be sure to work on that in the final two films.

MZP: And also on Hounds of God, as well as being a darker, more violent story than you’d tackled before (along with some heavy terrorist analogies which I’d love to hear your thoughts on), it also challenged you to work without your two leads (namely Connor and Gabriella). How did you approach this, and how did you find the experience of making Pike and Kaia the focus?

Michael Jay: Part of why that movie had such a thick plot was I knew Kaia & Pike weren’t leads. Much like with Connor when this whole thing first started, the idea wasn’t just to throw them in the deep end and see if they could swim. I dropped them in the middle of the Marianas Trench and say “okay, now get to the surface.” The werewolf culture was as good of a “trench” as I could use. Rob Kenneth, my right hand man, and I talked about ideas dealing with a drug-like storyline, they were going to get trapped in Quor’Toth at one point, a lot of ideas got tossed around. What really sold me on it was someone, I believe it was Matt Latham, saying that the main weaknesses of the two Connor movies were that Connor himself didn’t feel connected on a deeper level to the plot at hand. Kaia knows two things in her life: werewolf culture and life with Pike. So it was an easy thing to plot and write. Plus I liked the challenge of asking myself if the third level characters had the ability to roll with a story like that and still make it work. They had a lot of issues coming off of season two and getting to address those helped as well.

For the terrorism end of it, another Whedon nugget was he uses monsters to tell stories about people and about the world. Being an American, I hear about the “war on terror” to an almost ridiculous degree. I felt like it would help the scale of the movie if I went to that place. Theiss, the main villain in the movie, makes a point that I actually agree with. Most of the world’s major events were jumpstarted by war and violence. It’s a sad, but true notion. When a game changing event occurs, like when slavery was abolished here in the States, those who oppose tend to react swiftly and violently. It’s sad, but it’s human nature. I wanted to tell a story about that. Connor just exposed demons to the rest of the world at the end of season two. This is a world in which some humans believe that other humans of different religions and ethnicities are beneath them and should be killed. Just look at the Holocaust. Now all of a sudden, there are all these hideous, otherworldly creatures right under their nose? That wasn’t going to end well. There’s a story to be told there. It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops to write, but it was something I felt needed to happen to push the narrative forward.

MZP: Going into Season Three, it’s obvious Connor will be back but are you going to focus more on the why than the how?

Yes. “How” is actually the teaser of the first episode. I don't waste any time getting that out of the way. The rest of the season is the answer to why.

MZP: What teases can you offer us about new character Dare?

Michael Jay: I feel like each character represents something in Connor that he can’t fully let himself be. Dare is that detached, edgy, screw the world, I’m going to live my life the way I want part of Connor that he can’t indulge because of what he is. She’s had a rough life, but she’s a shark. She’s always moving forward. That’s something Connor would like to do, but can’t.

MZP: And if you’d like to shamelessly plug the shiny new website your lady friend produced for you, do so now…

Michael Jay: Yes, a big thank you to my girlfriend, Leigh Nguyen, patented MZP lurker and graphics sensei for doing the new kickass layout for the Connor website.

In part 2, we discuss the controversial ending to season two and more on the subsequent movie Hounds of God. Look for that next week.

Click here to read the second part of the interview