Marvel’s ‘Cloak & Dagger’ Showrunner Joe Pokaski On Crafting The Kind Of Heroes The World Needs Now

Freeform

Marvel still can seemingly do no wrong, box-office wise, and that success has been largely mirrored through an ever-expanding array of television shows that presently air across the TV spectrum. The newest arrival, Cloak & Dagger (debuting on Freeform on Thursday, June 7), stands out from the rest. The show follows two teens who discover their dormant superpowers and realize they’re better as a team than apart. Yes, this sounds like another current Marvel show, Runaways, but Cloak & Dagger is infused with a gritty reality that extends its appeal from the targeted young adult audience to an older crowd.

The show’s two main characters — Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph), who possesses the ability to engulf others in darkness, and Tandy (Olivia Holt), who can emit light daggers — source back to 1980s Spider-Man issues and have briefly popped up in a number of Marvel comics. They’re finally getting their due with episodes that dig deep into their struggles and motivations, and while their essential characteristics from the comics remain, their backstories have been significantly tweaked to add more layers to an already rich history.

In an intriguing twist, the team behind Cloak & Dagger also moved the show’s setting from New York to New Orleans. Showrunner Joe Pokaski (producer and writer of many Heroes and Daredevil episodes) was gracious enough to speak with us about that and several other topics, including the decision to tackle heavy cultural issues. Here’s our conversation:

I watched several episodes with my daughter. She’s 17, and she just loved the show, and of course, she wanted you to know.

That is awesome to hear. She has very good taste.

Well, most of the time….

That’s exactly who we’re aiming for.

She digs Spider-Man, and of course, Cloak and Dagger debuted in Spider-Man comics, if I can go ahead and use him as a springboard?

Yeah!

Unlike Peter Parker, these two characters both suffer from class-based hardships. Considering this is a show about teen superheroes, what was the process in deciding to stick with such heavy themes?

I think we live in a heavy time, where we’re learning more and more that teenagers aren’t immune to it. We already wrote the first version of the scripts before Trayvon Martin, and even before some #MeToo things came out, and I think we kind of wanted to tell the story of the kind of heroes we need for the world right now.

Are today’s teens going to identify with these heroes?

I hope so, and I hope these heroes identify with these teens. I get a lot of inspiration from the Parkland kids. It seems like we live in a world where a lot of people, when you’re grown up, they say, “Too bad we can’t change that, that’s set in stone.” There’s some inspiration to be found in the real world of kids who say, “No, I’m gonna change it,” and hopefully the show will kind of provide a similar kind of inspiration to young kids growing up.

And what do you think adults will be able to gain from it?

I think a sense of hope again. A little sense of hope and bravery, I think we set up Tandy so she was this cynical human being, almost at an adult point of view, and thanks to this relationship with another human, kind of climbed her way back toward hope. And then Tyrone, just kind of living in fear, kind of learning to be brave again by way of Tandy. So hopefully, what I at least try to take from it is that we can all kind of embrace our inner kid and challenge the world to be a better place.

One thing I found very interesting is that the show has essentially exchanged the backgrounds to the characters from the comics. So Tandy starts out privileged, but she’s now a hustler on the wrong side of the tracks. Whereas Tyrone witnessed police brutality, and he was moved to sheltered surroundings. Why did the show switch those stories up?

You know, I think part of it was that the presidential election was kind of gearing up, and there were a lot of candidates that were conflating race and socioeconomic status. I thought that was interesting and misread, to be honest.

So we thought about [how] it might be interesting to put Tyrone in a different background, so that we can kind of isolate him from one condition and really talk about what it’s like being a young man in America, regardless of your socioeconomic status. And then on the other side, Tandy, we were able to take away her monetary privilege while keeping her white privileges intact. But it seemed like the more we separated them, the more interesting the human study became.

The show doesn’t modify which character is powered by darkness and which by light. And although the cloak sources back to the 1980s comics, the fact that Tyrone’s still wearing one seems really relevant.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the young man in his hoodie is still symbolic in America.

Why New Orleans?

It’s funny, when [Marvel Television head] Jeph Loeb and the president of Marvel Comics and I first started talking about the show, we had both said, “Can we do it outside of New York? You know, New York feels like it has a lot of superheroes. It feels like a pretty safe place.” We were talking about moving to a new city. And when we talked about New Orleans, it felt like it had this dark, gothic quality to it, as well as this … for me, it’s this city that’s refused to die.

You know, nature has challenged it, BP Oil has challenged it, and they’ve always come together and risen to the occasion, so it felt like a great place for Tandy and Tyrone to become the heroes.

How has your work on Daredevil and Heroes informed the choices made on this show?

They were kinda grad school for me growing up. Here, in particular, the thing I learned off both shows is that it’s all about character, and any of the genre elements are best served as metaphor to kind of bubble up some of the things we can’t talk about intelligently in traditional storytelling. I think genre storytelling of any kind allows you to step outside and elevate it to really understand the human condition a little better. So I think that was all great training to be the guy in charge and make this as much about character as possible.

Now as far as a dream crossover goes, do you have a Top Three?

Yes. I need to start by saying that my opinions do not reflect the Marvel Corporation or Marvel Television, or any legal barriers, just to be clear, but the Number One — you had already pointed out right away — it’s Spidey. I was in grade school when I first opened up a first Spider-Man comic and saw Tandy and Tyrone, and I feel like they deserved … that they belong together?

Another one, it probably doesn’t come as a big surprise, is Runaways. I think the second book of the Runaways comic, Cloak and Dagger show up, and they’re tasked to bring these guys back in, and it’s just a fun crossover, and I think they have a history, and I really like what [showrunners] Josh [Schwartz] and Stephanie [Savage] did on their show. So that’s a slightly more realistic one that we might be able to pull off.

And then the third one is … I would just like to see them in a movie for no more than two minutes because I think that’s what Cloak and Dagger are. More than any other comic book characters, they’re the ones who can show up in any book, and you’re not surprised, and if you’re surprised, it’s kind of a pleasant surprise.

But [when] there’s an X-Men book, or a crossover — Spider-Man, Daredevil, when they show up, I kinda … at least get that smile that says, “Oh look … Tandy and Tyrone are here.” So it would be fun to see them in the movies, appearing on the same scale they show up inside the comics.

Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger debuts on Thursday, June 7 at 8:00 pm on Freeform.

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