Exclusive - Blake 苍鹭 gives us an inside look at Agent X 

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‘Agent X’ was the surprise of the fall. But the story of how it was made is equally compelling. Creator Blake Herron told us how ‘X’ hit the spot.

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If there were an award for Most Improved TV Show,

would’ve won it by a mile. Over ten episodes, it broke from the typical action show mold into a true adventure where you couldn’t wait to see what John Case would do next.

What happened behind the scenes is just as admirable. The show took a trio of actors you’d never expect to see together and a creator who’d never had his own series before, and delivered something far beyond what should ever have been possible.

isn’t just an example of how to get a TV show right; it’s a story about how good people worked their behinds off to make great TV, too.

We had the pleasure of sitting down with series creator Blake Herron to talk about the journey of

Interestingly, the story actually starts in the early days of TNT. “One of my earliest gigs was ironically, TNT’s first TV series. I was a freelance writer for [the 1996 Western]

Though his career then took him into films, most notably co-writing

, “Even then I said there’s something kind of cool about being able to tell stories every week.”

But he still had to find the right story to tell. It was a later conversation with Michael White – the head of Turner Original Productions – that led to the genesis of

“Michael White had a notion that the President would have his own secret agent,” he explained, “and when I thought that through, I was like that’s going to be tough to justify. The President is going to need plausible deniability.

“Then it occurred to me, we think the Vice President doesn’t do anything – what if she does? And the icing on the cake was the fact that the Vice President takes a different oath from the President, and vows to protect the country against all enemies foreign and domestic.”

With the premise in place and once a script had been written, it was time to start the casting process – perhaps the show’s biggest hurdle. When you’re looking for someone who’s supposed to be the most elite agent in the country, you can’t cast just anyone. Finding John Case wasn’t easy, and it might not have been possible without Sharon Stone.

“Basically all the guys who could do Jeff [Hephner]’s part were big movie stars who weren’t born to do TV, so we thought, okay we need to discover somebody. We need to discover somebody awesome,” Blake recalled. “That meant, from a practical standpoint, that we needed the Vice President role to be [played by] someone huge to justify our budget to the network.

“The first person we went to was Sharon,” he continued. “She was the perfect person for it, and we thought she’s never going to do it but she really responded to it, both artistically and demographically. She loves politics and she loved the notion that we would make patriotism cool.”

“I knew creatively, eventually I wanted to put her in harm’s way, put a gun in her hand and put her in dangerous situations. You needed someone like Sharon, who could have that type of versatility and do both action and drama.

“Then Sharon wholeheartedly supported us going after Jeff. We flew Jeff in, we did what the network wanted and did a little chemistry reading,” he added, “and he crushed it. They were fantastic together.”

In fact, much of what audiences have come to love about John Case is because of Jeff Hephner. He’s one of those actors who’s climbed his way up the ladder simply by being a hard-working and genuinely good person. He has certain heroic qualities in real life. What casting him meant to the writing staff was “making the character utterly relatable,” Blake said. “We were hoping to bring something audiences could look at and say, I could know that guy.”

So after years of writing and negotiating and searching for the right cast,

was finally ready to come to life. But just as they had finished shooting the pilot, something else happened.

“Right when we were trying to get in, there was a shake up at TNT,” Blake said. “Michael White, we were his baby, said wait it out, and they brought in Kevin Reilly to remake the network – and he’s doing a great job.”

Under the new regime, it was entirely possible that the series might not have gotten on the air at all. Instead, TNT thankfully moved forward with a first season, putting the pressure on Blake and his writing staff to deliver ten episodes that delivered action but also character development and an ongoing mythology – all of it crammed into 42 minutes every week.

“It was brutal,” Blake told us. “Early on, we decided to use that flashback in the beginning [of each episode]. So you’re establishing character and action at the same time. You’re planting the seed of something that hopefully you’ll pay off in that episode either, on a character level or on a plot level.”

Then as with every action show, budget was always a factor. “We had to deliver the show in eight days,” he continued, “and that meant keeping the scripts very lean. We kept the scripts at most 50 pages, and if we got over 50 pages we quickly worked to get it down, sometimes as short as 45, 46 pages.

“That meant really predicting, once we chopped it down, where we would land time-wise. That took some refinement over two or three episodes, but we did it,” he added. “And then trying to make the action organic to the story – that it wasn’t just action for action’s sake, that we learned something, if at all possible, in every action scene.”

This incredible efficiency unfolds the deeper you get into

‘s season. The flashbacks provide vital clues not only to each episode, but sometimes to the overall arc of the show, such as in “Truth, Lies and Consequences,” when they give you a huge hint about John’s father. If you watch the interactions between John and Ray Marks (Andrew Howard), you get a much better understanding of why he became Volker.

And something the show mastered later on that it didn’t have initially was that every fight had its own piece of the story. If you look at the train sequence in “Penultimatum”, for example, there’s a whole chunk of that which is just a massive fight – but it also reunited John with Olga (Olga Fonda) and moved the pace of the episode along instead of wasting valuable time showing our hero waiting on a train.

More than perhaps any other series in years, you can see

evolve the longer the season goes on. The actors settle into their roles; the writers get a chance to devote more time to character. In the back half of the season, there’s an entire episode devoted to character development that just happens to have one of the year’s most impressive fight sequences at the end of it. If you watch this show straight through, you see a picture of a dedicated group of people putting the pieces together and then really turning it on.

What would Blake consider to be the highlights of the season? “My favorite episodes are episodes six, seven and ten, which would be ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Long Walk Home’ and ‘Fidelity,’” he said, “but I have a fondness for ‘The Devil and John Case.’

“My favorite parts of the show are these interesting little mini relationships,” he continued. “Olga and John, everyone calls them Jolga. I love Malcolm and John’s arc, where Malcolm seems so perfect and this proud paternal character that has his own flaws. I think John and Natalie end up having an interesting relationship, where in the pilot he’s educating her but by the end, she’s lecturing him on what it means to be a patriot.”

These are the things on which television shows live and die. If audiences don’t care about the characters, it doesn’t matter what superpowers they have. Particularly in the later episodes,

became as much if not moreso about John Case’s emotional journey as it was about his missions.

By “Fidelity,” he’s not just saving the leaders of the free world, but he’s also confronting his doubts about the cause, dealing with his broken relationship with Malcolm, and learning the truth about his recruitment. It’s not a fluke that the finale numbers were almost as good as the ones from the show’s premiere – because the show had come into its own and was standing tall.

Yet in modern television, delivering the product is really only half the war. The other half is what you do off screen, and

So many of its cast and crew members – from Blake himself, to producers Peter O’Fallon and Mark A. Altman, to half the cast including Jeff Hephner and Sharon Stone – are on Twitter, and even now they’re actively engaging with fans to answer questions and just share the experience. According to Blake, that’s all just part of the job.

“We just really feel this is a fan show,” he said of the social media turnout. “We’d be doing this even if there wasn’t a practical benefit to it. We want to know how we’re doing. The whole purpose of this show is that people come home at the end of a day and they can count on us to take them away for an hour, and if we’re not doing that then gosh, we should move on.

“The fans are part of the show. It’s not like we make the show and then we throw it over the cliff. The fans are part of our crew, if you think of it that way.”

After more than three years of hard work,

rose from the pilot that almost wasn’t to a series that absolutely should have earned a second season. It did everything it could have toward renewal and then some; its biggest failing was its misfortune to be scheduled on Sunday nights, opposite NFL football and

But when one looks at things the show could control, it’s hard to find fault. There’s no catastrophic mistake, no massive oversight, no ego that superceded sense. Everyone involved on the series, from the people we saw to the ones we’ll never get to meet, came together to make this series happen and they continue to work hard to keep it alive.

As the creative team looks for potential landing spots for a second season – which could be anywhere from a streaming service like Hulu (which doesn’t have an action show on its roster), to another cable channel like WGN America (which is making a bigger push for original series), to even another shot at TNT – the best thing that fans can do is what they’re already doing: keep watching and keep believing.

“Our numbers have been going up every week,” Blake told us. “We were cancelled with three weeks left in our show. Generally, the show evaporates. People just stop watching. And in our case, our numbers kept going up.

“So keep hope is the message, and just keep telling friends. At the end of the day, it’s going to be whether or not this show is forgotten.”

With numbers for the season finale almost as good as those for the season premiere, and new hits coming in on YouTube and on demand every week,

is very much still a part of the TV world. Just like John Case, it’s still fighting when it’s facing the toughest of circumstances, and people are finally getting to know how strong it is.

But whatever happens next, between the great storytelling and entertaining characters that these ten episodes gave us and the memorable story of how this unlikely group of people all united to defy every expectation, this show definitely will not be forgotten.

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