Shadowhunters: Second Season Talk from Showrunner

The first season of the Shadowhunters TV series premieres tonight, at 9:00pm ET/PT, on the newly minted channel, Freeform (formerly ABC Family). Before season one has even begun, showrunner Ed Decter is talking about Shadowhunters, season two.

Based on The Mortal Instruments fantasy book series by Cassandra Clare, Shadowhunters stars Katherine McNamara as Clary Fray. Fray learns she is from a long line of demon fighting human-angel hybrids. The cast also includes: Dominic Sherwood, Alberto Rosende, Matthew Daddario, and Harry Shum, Jr.

Excerpts from KSite TV (emphasis, ours):

The way this show is structured, will each season be based on a particular book by Cassandra Clare, or will the series jump around?

No. We’re borrowing liberally from the whole canon when we need to. It’s a fairly complicated world, so we need to expand a little bit from the storytelling that Cassandra did in the books, for the simple reason that she stays very, very close to Clary, and we learn about a lot of the larger things that happened in the world through discussions with Clary, and we, of course, have to show those things. So, just by the normal visualizing of the story, we are borrowing from things, but we’re going to be hitting the giant landmarks that the audience for the books is expecting, but still keeping surprises for them about how we get to certain things, because it was already made into a movie. We had to make some surprises for the audience, so we’re not really following one book, two book, three book, because Book Two takes place in the span of, like, a week or something, so we would need more material than that. So, I think Season Two is mostly Book Two and Book Three, if we’re so fortunate to have a Season Two.

[Talking about the beautiful Institute set that features in season one] The sad thing, in Season 2 if we’re so lucky… in Season 2 we go to Idris, so we’re not at that set for long.

Will there be any new characters introduced in the series?

We’ve created a character to symbolize the Clave, a new character called Lydia who, again, we got her name from all of Cassandra’s books… but the reason why we created her was, we weren’t going to show Idris and the Clave this season; we wanted something to hold for next season, to reveal a whole new world, so we needed a representative to arrive. With her comes an amazing storyline and an amazing twist in the plot. That’s someone to look forward to. She’s played by Stephanie Bennett.

Have you read Cassandra Clare’s fantasy book series? Are you planning to tune in for Freeform’s series premiere of the Shadowhunters TV show? Does Shadowhunters sound like a show that will be renewed for a second season? Tell us what you think.