In my humble opinion, unlike Zero Hour‘s trailer the one for Red Widow bodes well for the upcoming ABC drama from Melissa Rosenberg (Dexter, the Twilight saga) and starring Radha Mitchell. The show revolves around Mitchell’s character Marta Walraven, a stay-at-home mom who gets tangled up in a bloody and dangerous tale involving her husband’s death and organized crime. Specifically, she must assume the role of her organized crime husband Franklin after he is assassinated in a drug-related incident.
At the TCAs Rosenberg made it a point that if you tune in you will get answers to some of the series’ big questions that are introduced inside the string of the first season’s eight episodes. “Having learned from The Killing, we are answering the questions of who killed Franklin and where is the coke.” (If you didn’t know, there was a huge backlash when AMC’s The Killing failed to reveal the season’s murderer in the finale.) “The question of how Marta is going to get herself out of this is a series-long question. And each effort will lead to the continuing story line,” Rosenberg expanded.
Red Widow is based on the 2010 Dutch series Penoza. After a successful run, Penoza (which was originally deemed an eight episode mini-series) received an order for more episodes but its writers had killed off many the characters and so they had a harder time reinstating the show. Rosenberg is more than aware of this and said, “By the end of the season, we’ll have a satisfying answer to the season, but I’m not giving anybody up. I’m not killing everyone, and I’m not letting anyone off the hook. Some people die, but not all of them. For me, it’s all about building characters and relationships you can cling to for five or seven years.”
Rosenberg envisions Mitchell’s Marta to eventually transform into a dark, deeply flawed antiheroine. She said the character is inspired by such flawed characters as Breaking Bad‘s Walter White and Dexter‘s Dexter Morgan. “She could go as bad as Walter White,” she said. “We don’t go that far in the [first season], but there is definitely room to evolve.” Mitchell compared her character to Luc Besson’s creation in La Femme Nikita by describing Marta as “a character under duress. I always thought the character was iconic, and a kind of character I wanted to explore if I had one more character in my career.”
Red Widow premieres Sunday, March 3 at 9PM.