Beauty And The Beast comes back for a new season on a new night, starting up Monday, October 7 on The CW, and fresh from Comic-Con, we have some intel about Season 2. We’ll be rolling out interviews over the next few days and weeks, but first, some sad news about a BATB departure as we go into the new season.
“Joe is not coming back,” show Executive Producer Jennifer Levin confirmed at the Beauty And The Beast press room at Comic-Con. “As you know, our show became less of a police procedural, and it felt like we really wanted to take Tess and explore other aspects of Tess, and get her out of that relationship. So, she is not dating Joe,” she said.
“We think he’s an incredible actor, but we think in moving our show out from [a procedural], it meant holding onto stages… [We needed to] add other elements to tell the story that’s not just a crime procedural,” fellow Executive Producer Sherri Cooper confirmed.
“It was sort of like Evan. We didn’t want to lose Evan either, but we felt like where the story was taking us,” Levin added.
Joe was played by Brian White, a big fan favorite and huge supporter of the show who participated and interacted frequently with fans on his @ActorBrianWhite Twitter handle. Hopefully, the character will appear on the show again.
As we do have news about a departure, we also have news of an arrival: Longtime Charmed showrunner Brad Kern has been tapped to be a part of the BATB team for Season 2. “He’s our co-showrunner,” Sherri Cooper confirmed. “Executive Producer. We’re so happy to have him.”
“He’s incredible,” Levin gushed. He wrote the first episode… he’s the one who has really brought in this idea when we’re in [the writer’s room], we really focus on the bad guy and what their game is, and we think of that because Sherri and I…”
“We’ll pitch VinCat!” Cooper finished. “He goes, ‘what’s the character arc? What is going on? Let’s do a timeline’.” It sounds as though there is a very strong plan for the show’s second season, and that plan also will feature the survival of Gabe (Sendhil Ramamurthy).
“He’s back, and Brad Kern came up with this amazing story for him, on how he came back, and how he survived that shooting, and what that’s done to his character,” Levin teased.
“It’s a great arc for him,” Cooper added. “It was the kind of thing that when he pitched it, it was like ‘Oh! Of course!'”
“It makes his character much more complicated,” Levin said.
Beauty And The Beast Season 2 premieres Monday, October 7 on The CW! Be sure to follow our BATB-focused Twitter feed @KSiteTV_Beauty!