[Warning: ALL the spoilers ahead.]
In case you missed the news last week, SurrealEstate has concluded with its third season, which aired last summer. On Friday, I spoke with series creator George R. Olson and series star Tim Rozon about saying goodbye to the show. You can read that piece here. In the next part of my conversation with Olson, he talks about his wonderful cast and characters and unpacks some of the final season’s big moments.
There will be spoilers. You have been warned.
In Season 3, the Big Bad of Tyler/Elvis was wrapped up by the finale, but Olson didn’t want to leave it at that, hence the Augie shocker that followed. While that might seem like something that was mapped out from the beginning of the season, Olson explains it was an idea that came to him at the end of it. “We were breaking the season finale, figuring out how the whole story with Tyler was going to be concluded. And [I thought], everybody’s going to think, ‘Okay, well that was the big moment. Now it’s just going to peter out for the rest of the episode,” he recalls.
“And we just started talking in the writer’s room, and I had a thought. I said, ‘You guys aren’t going to believe what I’m about to say … but what if we kill off August?’ And they said, ‘Noooooo!’ Everybody loves August. And it’s such a tribute to Mo Dean Wint, who plays him and has just created this wonderful character who is so wise and so clever, yet so nice and so well read.”
“Of all the characters in the show, all of whom I love deeply, August always felt like the character that I would most like to be like. The stoicism, the dry humor, the never getting ruffled, all of those things. So, the thought of saying goodbye to him was very tough.”
Then Olson pitched the kitchen and bar scenes, which were already crystallized in his mind, and aired as he envisioned it, and the writers were sold. “The wonderful thing about our show is that death always comes with a little implied asterisk. Death is no longer the end. With our show, it’s a little bit of a built-in, because our whole show centers around people for whom death was not the end,” he points out.
“It’s a little bit of a cop out to keep someone going, but I’ll cop out if it’s somebody as wonderful as ours. And someone who our viewership loves so deeply. I had a plan about where we would go from there and how our next season would begin.”
“Obviously, August was not quite as dead as we made him out to be earlier, and there were some thoughts about tying that to his experience at Asdra. When he had the download of all of those things from the machine that was looking for him. I had thought about several things that we might do, several roads that we might go down.”
“And again, the thought of having August as kind of your inside guy in the afterlife was fascinating. Who would you rather have? Who else has the wisdom and the restless intellect that he does, combined with the kindness and the decency that he always brought to every situation.”
Olson says Wint was understanding of the twist. “Once we were getting close to having the cast receive the scripts, I reached out to Mo and said, ‘You’re going to read 310, and there’s going to be a surprise there, so let me just kind of prepare you for it,” he recalls.
“And I explained to him what was going to happen and how it was going to unfold and everything. And, you know, mensch and professional that he is, Mo said, ‘I trust you completely. Whatever you think is best for the show and best for the character, I’m on board with.'”
Earlier in the season, we met and very quickly had to say goodbye to Tag, played by Alex Ozerov-Meyer, and Olson says that one was a hard choice. “Alex was so wonderful. He came to the set, and we shot almost all of his stuff in a couple of days. It was reams and reams of obscure dialogue and talking about cruise missiles and tigers and all kinds of things,” Olson laughs.
“And he came and he was so prepared and so professional. He just had that made that character so fun. We had all 10 of our episodes written before we started photography, so we knew what was going to happen and where it was going to go, and how all that stuff would happen.”
“As we saw how beautifully he fit into our ensemble and how funny he was in all these scenes and everything, I was thinking, ‘Should I really have killed him off?’” You have thoughts like that and everything, but that’s really the point. You want people to love these characters, so when something happens to them, you feel it.”
“And that is one of those things that you always second guess yourself on. I tend to love my characters so much. I don’t want bad things to happen to them, but without bad things and conflict and everything, there is no drama. I think season three was a little more emotional as far as having the stories with Madison and the single mom who died and Harry and the cabin, which was another favorite.”
On the other side of the emotional spectrum, Susan (Sarah Levy) got her happy ending with Crash (Stephen Huszar), which Olson was thrilled to give her. “I felt like we have thrown so many rocks at Susan over the first two seasons, [which] just shows how strong she is, and how smart she is. And I just loved Susan and a lot of people who like our show did, too. When we were breaking the season, I said, ‘I really want to give her a nice guy,’” he explains.
“After she had Bob Livingston, she had the Enso house, and I said, ‘But first I’m going to throw her some real jerks,’ because it seems, and a couple of the writers were saying, too, that it seems like the minute you say, ‘Okay, I’m done, never going to date again, I never want a relationship. I’m not made that way,’ is when the universe says, ‘Okay, you get to have somebody. Now you can have him.’”
“And then it was really a hard part to cast because nobody seemed good enough for Susan. We wrote him you know as just a genuinely good guy. In both of the really bad dates that she has, [they’re] talking about themselves. And the very first conversation that she has with Crash, he asks about her and they talk.”
“And when they go on their first date, they talk about being a real estate agent and how wonderful that must be to help people find their dream homes, so he is completely interested in what she’s about, and how she feels. And that’s what’s been missing … she’s finally met someone who cares more about her and really wants to hear her and get to know her and hear how she feels about things.”
“One of our editors commented that he kept waiting for him to grow horns or end up being the bad guy. And it’s like we’ve given her so much, put her in so many tight spots, it would just be nice for her to have this good thing happening for her.”
Aside from her personal life, Olson was also glad to have Roman Ireland firing on all cylinders, so much so that Luke misses all the signals about Tyler being a very dangerous blast from his past. “One of the fun things about season three was that we had Luke and Susan back at full force and at the height of their powers. And that was really fun to not have to show Luke trying to cover up for not having his power and being defensive and self-centered about it,” he says.
“From the very beginning, we really strove to make a show about real estate because if we stop being a show about real estate, we’re just another ghost whisperer kind of thing. And some of those are great, but they’re not us. What’s fun about us is that sending these poor, troubled souls along to whatever the universe has in store for them is not the end. It is the means towards the end, which is a real estate transaction.”
“That’s the fun thing and our special sauce. One of the fun things that we were able to do this season was really have them focus on the real estate. So, when you want something that badly, and you have that kind of professional carrot dangled in front of you, you tend to miss the stuff in your peripheral vision. That’s kind of the way we saw Luke progressing until it just was right there.”
That Big Bad was gleefully brought to life by R. Austin Ball. “We really wanted to have somebody who was a personification [instead of a house as in the previous two seasons]. Austin was so wonderful. He told me at one point in the shoot, ‘I’m having so much fun and this is so cool. The biggest fear that I have is that I’ll get to the end of it and say I wish I’d tried [X or Y],'” shares Olson. “And so, he tried everything, the outtakes we have of stuff that he tried … we were just cracking up, and I don’t think he left anything behind.”
When Lomax was introduced in Season 2, she was stepping into a firmly baked set of characters and castmates, and Olson said she clicked immediately on both fronts, much to his delight, and he was thrilled to explore her backstory in Season 3. “I can’t tell you how much fun it is to write Lomax, and so much of that comes straight from Elena [Juatco]. It really worried me back in Season 2, the thought of bringing somebody into this wonderful little ensemble we had,” he recalls.
“And just from day one, she made Lomax so interesting and so distinctive and so different that she just became a real go-to kind of person. She would always have something to say, and she could drop a line like nobody and just throw it away. And it was so funny. Writing for her was just a joy and having that character to bring into that.”
“Before we started the writer’s room on Season 3, I talked to everybody to get thoughts from them and what they’re hoping for. And for Elena, the thought of meeting Lomax’s parents and finding out a little bit more about her upbringing in the death care industry seemed like just such a juicy opportunity.”
“And she absolutely nailed all of those moments. One of my favorite scenes is the one where she’s having the conversation with the cadaver. And she just plays it beautifully. It was just such a fun thing to do and such a tribute to how great Elena is.”
“She was wonderful from the first day. And it is hard with that kind of chemistry that we had, and it still amazes me that we cast this whole thing at the height of the pandemic. None of these people met. They had known each other professionally on certain projects and stuff, but as far as doing any chemistry reads [we didn’t have that].”
Olson was also happy to have Zooey and Savannah Basley stay in the mix. “Zooey really grew up in this season, and she throws away a line in, I think it’s 301, where she’s saying, ‘God, I cannot be the grownup in the room.’ And it’s so fun to watch her as she grows into this,” he says.
“Savannah is just one of those people who grabs the camera. It’s impossible when she is on camera to not be drawn to her. And with Zooey, who’s kind of a force of nature as a character, combining with Savannah, who is just so magnetic, having her available was just such a gift.”
When the series first began, competing realtor Rita was an immediate frenemy and foil for Luke, and she continued to recur throughout the run. This season, she got a small taste of what it is Luke does when she found herself alone in a house with the dearly departed but not quite vacated tenant.
“Alison Brooks just takes that character and makes her so wonderfully shallow and ambitious and abrasive and everything. And when I got to Ottawa, on her first day of shooting, I said, you haven’t seen 309 yet, but that’s a present to you. All of those scenes with Magnus, who was also just wonderful, were so good and so fun to watch and then that just heartbreaking phone call at the end to her daughter,’ Olson shares.
“You got to see what a great actor Allison really is, and taking a character who’s not part of the core ensemble, but really has been part of the show since the pilot and really just letting us get to know her just a little bit better and seeing her in action is the kind of fun thing that I will always relish about that show.”
“Every single actor in our ensemble you could write to, and you wanted to write really great stuff for them. You knew that what they would give you is so much more than what was on the page. And they’re all just absolutely wonderful people, which is great, but they’re so good and so fun and they loved those characters.”
Two other recurring cast members who returned in Season 3 were Tenille Read and Megan and Tanner Joy as Rochelle, and Olson was excited to integrate them into the story. “I missed Tenille all through Season 2, and the thought of bringing her back and kind of rekindling [Megan’s relationship with Luke] slowly, with difficulty, was really attractive to me,” he explains.
“And bringing back Tanner Joy was just a no-brainer. That was a function of wanting to see August in love, and she was so wonderful in that. And she comes across so strong, so smart, and the kind of woman that that August would be attracted to. Having those opportunities and wanting to see my favorite characters happy to some extent, while still keeping the drama alive was great. They were part of the family.”
You can catch all three seasons of SurrealEstate now on Hulu in the US and Crave in Canada. All of our previews and interviews are here.
Photos courtesy of Syfy and Blue Ice Pictures.
