It’s appropriate that a television series about vampires should prove unusually difficult to kill. Long before Joe Port and Joe Wiseman became the showrunners behind CBS’ Ghosts, the longtime writing partners came up with another supernatural comedy. Eternally Yours would follow Liz and Charles, two vampires who discovered that pledging your love for eternity sounds considerably more romantic before you’ve actually spent 500 years together.
The idea was born in 2015, but Eternally Yours would subsequently die more than once. CBS developed it and passed and other networks weren’t interested, but years later, it resurfaced as a live table read and then was reimagined as an animated series, only to be rejected again. Along the way, though, something unexpected happened: Eternally Yours helped Port and Wiseman land Ghosts. The success of that series, in turn, helped create a television environment where their other supernatural comedy suddenly made sense.
Eleven years after they wrote the original pilot, Eternally Yours finally made it to series and it all began because Port and Wiseman realized they’d already spent an awfully long time together themselves.
Two Guys Stuck Together Forever
Port and Wiseman met while working as assistants on the animated series Dilbert in 1999 and eventually became writing partners. By 2015, they’d been together professionally for 16 years. While trying to develop another project, their conversation turned toward relationships—and their own seemingly endless partnership.
JOE PORT: “It sounds weird to say about this vampire show, but the relationships are very autobiographical. When we were developing it, we were like trying to think of ideas from our lives. Even when something is fantasy or sci-fi, it still comes from real life. We started talking about our long-running writing partnership, and we were like, ‘What about two people who are stuck together forever?’”
From there, the vampire element provided a way of taking an ordinary relationship question to an absurd extreme.
JOE PORT: “We started talking about writing partnerships and the idea of a marriage and people stuck together forever, so the idea of a marriage on steroids, like vampires who never die, and what it would be like to be truly together forever is how we came up with that.”
Wiseman similarly described the idea as an exploration of people who had been together for a very long time, except they “took it to the extreme” by making them vampires. There was one slight complication. Port and Wiseman soon discovered that Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi had already made a comedy about vampires living together, What We Do in the Shadows.
JOE PORT: “We watched it and loved it because it was incredible.”
Rather than abandoning their idea, they continued developing Eternally Yours around the element that distinguished it: this wasn’t simply a comedy about vampires. It was about what eternity could do to a relationship. CBS developed the project, but passed on the pilot in early 2016. CBS Studios subsequently tried shopping the script elsewhere, without success. For the time being, Eternally Yours was dead.
The Dead Pilot That Wouldn’t Stay Dead
Three years later, producer Andrew Reich approached Port and Wiseman about performing the script for Dead Pilots Society, the podcast that gives unproduced television pilots the unusual opportunity to come to life in front of an audience.
JOE WISEMAN: “It’s amazing that they do that, because it’s really fun. Even if it doesn’t become a pilot and a series, it’s really nice to hear your pilot that you’ve worked so hard on come to life.”
One of Reich’s suggestions would have consequences neither Port nor Wiseman could have anticipated. He proposed British actor Ed Weeks for Charles. The writers hadn’t imagined the character that way. But then they heard Weeks perform it.
JOE PORT: “We weren’t thinking it was a British guy for some reason but after hearing him do it, it seemed like it was written like that.”
Weeks effectively became Charles that night, although nobody could have known he’d eventually play the character on television. More immediately, the reading gave Port and Wiseman something they’d never had before: a performed version of Eternally Yours they could put in front of people.
JOE PORT: “It was a fun night, and it was very useful to us. In the years to come, we started using that recorded table read as a calling card for Eternally Yours.”
The dead pilot had acquired a pulse. More importantly, the script itself helped Port and Wiseman secure the job that would change their careers. When CBS began developing an American adaptation of the BBC comedy Ghosts, Eternally Yours helped convince the studio that the pair knew how to combine supernatural concepts with character comedy.
From Vampires to Ghosts and Back Again
Even then, Eternally Yours wasn’t finished trying to come back. CBS Studios explored turning it into an animated comedy. Port and Wiseman used the Dead Pilots Society recording along with their script and newly commissioned artwork to demonstrate what the animated version could look like.
JOE WISEMAN: “We were able to hire an animator, Arthur Jones, who was great. He did drawings of all the characters and big pictures of the family together.”
That incarnation didn’t sell either. Under different circumstances, it might have been another frustrating ending. Instead, Port came to believe that the failure was remarkably fortunate, because by then, Ghosts was happening.
JOE PORT: “The story of this pilot, and series now, is that things worked out for a reason. Even as we were pitching it as the animated thing, we were starting to do Ghosts. It hadn’t premiered yet but once that came out and did well, I was kind of relieved we hadn’t sold it as this animated thing, because I was like, this seems like such a good Ghostscompanion. It seems like there’s an appetite for this single-camera genre, comedy with heart, for network TV now.”
The series that Eternally Yours had helped Port and Wiseman get was now demonstrating that there might finally be an audience for Eternally Yours itself. The two shows weren’t identical, but Wiseman saw them as coming from the same creative place.
JOE WISEMAN: “They definitely share a DNA of having fun supernatural ideas and characters, but ultimately both are telling grounded stories that people can relate to and will have a lot of heart. I feel like people will have a similar experience watching Eternally Yours as they do Ghosts.”
Resurrection
After Ghosts proved itself, CBS began taking another serious look at Eternally Yours. What had once been an unproduced pilot became a development room, then a pilot order and finally a series.
JOE WISEMAN: “There’s a lot of dead pilots, but this one felt like it kept trying to come back; every few years, the studio would ask us about it and say, what about this? Most shows don’t go, and most dead pilots don’t go, so I can’t say I knew this was going to happen but it did feel like people were supporting this project for a long time.”
When it came time to cast Charles, the actor who had helped define him years earlier was still there. Ed Weeks auditioned and finally took the character from a podcast table read to television. The role of Liz ultimately went to Allegra Edwards, who already had a connection to Port and Wiseman through appearances on Ghosts.
JOE WISEMAN: “She was in two or three episodes of Ghosts, and was fantastic. Everyone loved working with her, she was inventive. So, yeah, she was very much on our radar.”
Wiseman remembered that both Weeks and Briga Heelan, who had played Liz at the original table read, were given the opportunity to audition.
JOE WISEMAN: “Both Ed and Briga read, and they both did fantastic, Briga is an incredible actress. Allegra Edwards, who ultimately got the part, just came in and made it undeniable. But having Ed and Briga in was fantastic.”
Port sees another benefit to the project’s extraordinarily long gestation. Had CBS made the series in 2015, it couldn’t possibly have had the cast it has today.
JOE PORT: “We wrote this pilot 11 years ago, and it did not get a shot at the time. And then because of that, they called us a few years later to develop Ghosts. After, they decided to revisit this, which we’re so happy they did. And you know, Helen and Jaren would have been like 14 years old if it did get picked up then. So, we have this amazing cast because of the moment that this happened, and it all worked out.”
What Does 500 Years Do to Love?
Although Eternally Yours began with the idea of a married couple trapped together forever, the concept expanded over the years. The finished series examines relationships from several different perspectives. At its center are Charles and Liz, whose once-passionate relationship has survived for five centuries. Technically they’re still very much together. Romantically, things have become considerably more complicated. Port believes viewers don’t need any particular affection for vampire stories to recognize what’s going on.
JOE PORT: “Yeah, it’s gonna be very grounded and very relatable. You don’t even have to be into vampires or ghosts to watch Eternally Yours I think, if you just have a spouse that you’re sick of spending time with, you can relate to it.”
Then, perhaps realizing that quote might follow him home, Port offered an immediate clarification.
JOE PORT: “I should clarify, just for my own marriage’s sake, it’s actually not based on either of our marriages. It was inspired by our long-running writing partnership and our never-ending work marriage.”
Some of the details, however, really did come directly from the Joes. Charles’ habit of clearing his throat, something Liz found endearing centuries ago and now finds infuriating, was inspired by Wiseman.
JOE WISEMAN: “Apparently, I clear my throat a lot.”
Around Charles and Liz, Port and Wiseman have constructed relationships that allow them to examine the idea from very different angles. Jesse, himself a vampire, has repeatedly married humans. There’s a rather pragmatic reason.
JOE WISEMAN: “Jesse likes to marry humans because they die eventually. And then you can get a new relationship. They actually are probably our most healthy couple.”
At the other end of the spectrum are Charles and Liz’s vampire daughter Emma and her new human boyfriend, Max. Unlike her parents, Emma is at the beginning of a relationship, but she hasn’t exactly been given the healthiest example to follow.
JOE WISEMAN: “Emma has a couple of challenges. She’s had Liz and Charles modeling for her, and they don’t have — at least in an outward view — the most healthy relationship.”
Max presents another challenge because he’s unlike the men Emma has known before.
JOE WISEMAN: “She’s dated some bad boys. She kind of doesn’t have a lot of experience with someone like Max, who is sort of a little more romantic, wears his emotions on his sleeve, and earnest.”
That also puts Max directly at odds with Charles.
JOE WISEMAN: “Charles and Max in particular have competing worldviews about love.”
Wiseman reduces those competing philosophies to “cynicism versus optimism,” describing their conflict as a “constant battle” that will continue throughout the series. Five hundred years have given Charles plenty of reasons to become cynical. Max hasn’t lived long enough to stop believing in happily ever after.
Writing Their Own Vampire Rules
Port and Wiseman also discovered something useful while researching vampire mythology: there really isn’t a universally accepted set of rules. That gives Eternally Yours considerable freedom to decide which traditions exist in its world and which don’t.
JOE PORT: “There’s so much of it out there. And what you quickly realize, the more you consume, is how varying it is and how there’s no one set of rules. You really can just pick and choose what you think is best for your characters, for us, what we think will be the funniest situation.”
Sometimes that means adapting familiar lore for comic purposes. A vampire who doesn’t appear in mirrors, for example, faces an unusual occupational hazard if he happens to work as a personal trainer in a gym surrounded by them. The guiding principle, according to Port, is choosing “what we think works for the story and the characters” without creating unnecessary production problems. It also means these centuries-old vampires are perfectly capable of having opinions about the way popular culture has portrayed them.
The Next Life of Eternally Yours
Even after finally getting Eternally Yours onto television, Port and Wiseman aren’t treating the pilot as simply an introduction to the status quo.
JOE PORT: “Very similar to Ghosts, it has this big premise-shifting twist at the end of the pilot. This has a similar big twist at the end. It puts a lot of pressure on landing episode two. You really wanna have episode two guide you into the premise and set up the series.”
And because Port and Wiseman now find themselves running two supernatural comedies, there’s the inevitable question of whether their vampires might someday encounter their ghosts. Port has already figured out the logistics.
JOE PORT: “It would be easy to do because the ghosts, for the most part, can’t leave the property. But vampires could go on vacation. And they could check into Woodstone B&B.”
Whether that ever happens remains to be seen. What has already happened is arguably stranger. An idea born from two writers joking about their never-ending professional relationship survived rejection, became a podcast, nearly became a cartoon, helped its creators land another television series and then returned from the dead more than a decade later. Maybe Port had a little more faith in its immortality than he lets on. For the past few years, there has been a deliberately empty spot on the wall of his home office next to the poster for Ghosts.
JOE PORT: “I have a picture in my home office of the Ghosts poster. I moved it over to the left, and I left an empty space for it for the past few years because I was envisioning putting up an Eternally Yours poster next to it.”
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