SECRETS OF SALEM

Go behind the scenes with this exclusive look at the secrets of Salem. The mystery will be revealed Sunday at 10/9c, only on WGN America. Be sure you know where to watch: http://bitly.com/ SalemFinder

5 Weird Things You Don’t Know About ‘Salem’

WGN America takes a step back into the distant past — in the hopes of ensuring a brighter future for the cabler — at 10 p.m. Sunday with the debut of its first original drama series, “Salem.”

The supernatural period drama is set at the time of the witch trials in 1692 Massachusetts, where it turns out, in the series at least, there really was hocus-pocus going on. (Historians are confident there were no witches in Salem, only a lot of false allegations.) The Tribune Co. cabler needs “Salem” to stand out in a crowded field, especially as it goes up against “Mad Men,” “Game of Thrones” and “The Good Wife” in the killer Sunday timeslot.

The “Salem” production team went to great lengths to evoke a 17th century look and feel, with the wilds of Shreveport, La., subbing for the real Salem.

Among the unusual aspects of “Salem”:

• No less than 85% of the show’s 53 sets are lit by candlelight
• Most exterior scenes are lit by torches
• Costume designer Joseph Porro used vinyl, patent leather and plastic in the costumes to better reflect the candlelight
• One dress is made of human hair
• The undergarments worn by the prostitute characters are more than 100 years old

Bonus fact: Production designer Seth Reed most recently worked on Fox’s “Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey.”

“Salem” hails from Fox 21 and Prospect Park. Brannon Braga and Adam Simon wrote the pilot directed by Richard Shepard. Janet Montgomery, Ashley Madekwe, Seth Gabel, Shane West, Xander Berkeley, Stephen Lang and Tamzin Merchant star.

'Salem' review: Everything old is new again in debut episode

A mishmash of history and modern horror doesn't entirely work

By Liane Bonin Starr

There are many striking things about Salem (premieres Sun. April 20 at 10:00 p.m. on WGN). There is a surplus of gross and gory stuff, plenty of Puritans, and some of the most anachronistic dialogue I've ever heard in a period drama. Apparently the writers decided that the best way to capture the olde time speake of the 17th century is in cliches like "you can't keep a good man down," "he's a chip off the old block,"  "he fights like a girl" and my favorite, "I call bullshit!" Yes, someone really says "I call bullshit," I kid thee not.

Of course, it doesn't help that every actor (and, by extension, every character) seems to be operating on the belief he or she is in an entirely different project than the one they're in. As John Alden, Shane West ("Nikita") swaggers through Salem with plenty of snappy one-liners and an attitude ripped from a '60s spaghetti Western, while Janet Montgomery ("Human Target") might be more comfortable at "Downton Abbey." Seth Gabel as real-life minister Cotton Mather seems to have the most fully fleshed-out character and rips into the role of a squirrelly and insecure man of God with considerable zeal. Unfortunately, Mather is also one of the more disagreeable characters on the show.

Because the concept is that Salem was rife with witches, the story has plenty of bloody, graphic scenes that are indisputably gruesome but not necessarily scary. Unlucky residents swing from the gallows, one is branded, one is crushed, and a possessed woman bites off her own finger. Everyone appears to need a bath, so at least it all feels historically accurate. Oh, and there's a demon orgy, which mostly looks like a lot of people rolling around in motor oil.

It's not pretty when the Devil and other bloody demons keep popping up to get it on with tortured souls, but dramatic tension usually stems from us being invested in at least one or two characters.

Mary and John are the star-crossed lovers at the core of the story, but they don't exactly set off sparks.
That being said, it all looks great. Lots of candlelight, amazing sets, and charming touches like lizards with their eyes sewn shut and blood-covered people wearing pig and deer heads. If nothing else, the set designer and cinematographer for "Salem" are worth every penny.

Less impressive is whatever spin the show is trying to put on the hypocrisy of the Puritans elite and the way the witch panic was used to control wealth and freedom during the 17th century. There's opportunity for parallels to our modern era, but, with dialogue seemingly ripped from old magazines, I don't have much hope for complex thought or subtext.

Midway through the first episode, we discover the identity of one witch in such a way that suggests there could be an intriguing backstory saved for future episodes, so there's a possibility that this first shot may suffer from the weakness many pilots do. It's tasked with mashing together disparate genres and easing actors toward a middle ground that makes some kind of sense. Given the quality of the cast -- Xander Berkeley and Ashley Madekwe stand out as talents who are usually better than their material -- there's a chance that good acting will serve as sufficient distraction from the cornball dialogue, and a few more twists and turns in the plot could yield drama. The problem is that "Salem" ultimately suffers from a surplus of competition.

Flip through the channels, and it's easy to find mom witches ("Witches of East End"), sleek witches ("The Originals") and camp witches ("American Horror Story: Coven"). Adding the Puritan angle to the mix certainly doesn't sex up familiar territory, even if it does add historical context, and the gory stuff will feel familiar to anyone who just finished watching "Coven." With an idea that doesn't feel exactly groundbreaking, the basic elements of story and character needed more development before WGN pushed this one onto the stage.

Of course, it's not as if anyone ever seems to overdose on vampire-themed entertainment, so bring on the witches. 

'Salem' review: 'American Horror Story' lite

By Jeff Jensen

In the 17th-century saga of WGN America’s first-ever scripted series, Salem, black magic is legit, religion is an oppressive farce, and witches keep nipples in the dardnest places. The fiction reimagines infamous history. Those witch trials of Puritan-era Salem, Massachusetts? A conspiracy hatched by honest-to-God witches — a relatively gender-neutral term in this world; they can be female or male — as part of a takeover of the town. It’s hard to see why they’d be so hot for this piece of New World real estate. Salem’s an allegedly prosperous port — computer-generated ships mill in the harbor — but the joint’s one of those too clean, too hollow, small exterior/huge interior Hollywood period towns. But, hey: The secret occult takeover of the United States had to start somewhere.

The unimpressive set might be a poor spread, but Salem’s plot has a rich set-up. Grimly robed Puritan overlords, puffy with Biblical rectitude and bug-up-the-butt huffy about sex, rule the rustic roost. Horny toads get branded and locked in the stocks for boffing out of wedlock. So when Mary (Janet Montgomery) gets knocked up by boyfriend John Alden (Shane West) during a graveyard tryst the night before he trots off to war, she knows she’s screwed with a scarlet capital-letter F.

Mary does have a back-alley option of sorts in the form of the mysterious, maybe ageless Tituba (Ashley Madekwe), well-versed in necromancy. During a moonlight ritual in the surrounding wood crawling with shadowy critters and hideous creatures — escaped from the “Chaos Reigns!” freakshow forest of Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ — Mary’s swollen belly deflates and the baby inside goes POOF! Surrendered, it seems, to wilderness spirits for whom a child might serve a fiendish purpose.

Mary’s devilishly ironic liberation leads to deviously ironic empowerment, for Tituba’s strange Vera Drake-ing came at a price, as most bargains with underworld figures tend to do. Hardened enough by lost love, Mary becomes tainted further by supernatural agency — a witch. She likes it. She hates it. Her ill-gotten strength is sexy on the outside, ugly on the inside — a reality she sees whenever she looks in a mirror. She gains agency in other ways, too, like marrying, then enslaving one of Salem’s wealthiest men, whom she privately uses and abuses, taunts and teases with her sexuality and in other certifiably slimy ways. (The scene with the frog alone makes the pilot worth skimming.) She joins Tituba in an diabolique team-up that would seem to serve a mess of esoteric entities that reside in a wilderness tar pit — part Hellmouth, part Black Lodge — with whom they commune via a randy bedroom rite that’s clearly a metaphor for something else, unless I’m totally misreading the part where Tituba starts rubbing Mary with the phallic-looking thing. Anyway. The witches want Salem, Mary’s a key player, and then true love John Alden, weary from war adventures yet wealthy from unspecified ventures in New York, comes marching home after seven years away to complicate everything.

Early reaction to Salem expressed concern over an approach to history that might appear to vilify women instead of portraying them as victims of an unjust society. And yet, Mary is not unlike a few other women we know from better shows — desperate ladies who are lesser citizens in a degrading patriarchal society, who make bad deals for security or power and live to regret it. Mary’s kin to Alison, Cosima, and (most likely) Rachel on Orphan Black and Joan on Mad Men. Moreover, Salem does affirm — in fanciful, symbolic, and crude ways — the major points of the now generally accepted Salem narrative: religiously driven superstition and moral panic; the subjugation of women; the demonization of sexuality. Seth Gabel (Fringe, Arrow) plays pious preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather. At one point, Mather makes abusive use of a possessed girl by walking her around town like a dog to sniff out witches. But he has his own demons, too, and he likes to vigorously exorcise them with some hypocritical exercise at the local whorehouse. (Salem likes shocks and skin. If you can’t get buzz with quality…) 

I’m not sure where Salem is going with its mythology, but thematically/allegorically, the occult forces plotting against Salem represent a reckoning — a judgment against a misguided, corrupt culture for crimes against nature and humanity. And frogs. Despite solid acting and striking visual effects, the pilot is American Horror Story lite. The tone is a work in progress: On the cable universe continuum, it’s roaming somewhere between Starz camp and AMC self-serious. There’s story and emotion here, but I’m not sure how much or how potent. Mary is worth caring about; John (who I suspect will activate as a demon hunter, putting him further at odds with Mary), Mather and Tituba have backstories to tell, but none of them are as compelling as Mary, and the mythology toggles between familiar and provocative. Salem has narrative wells to tap yet needs even more dramatic options in the form of more diverse, interesting supporting characters. It’s best possible form might be Deadwood meets Sleepy Hollow. It should be so lucky to be so bold and fun. Regardless, Salem needs to be something more than it is, or it will quickly become a thing of the past.