"Are you interested at all in Salem? The idea of what happened there?" I said, "Of course! I have always been fascinated", and he said, "Do you think there is a TV series in that?". I said, "I am sure there is, let me go off and think about it." And that was the kind of stuff I was obsessed with as a kid, particularly HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a truly American horror. Plus, I started reading nonfiction stuff about witchcraft and events that happened in Europe in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and my wanting to do something with that. And for the first time I thought about it, and said, "Wait a minute. We always look at the events in Salem in the Arthur Miller, "The Crucible" kind of perspective, and we kind of block out the accusations that happened there. And the world of witchcraft they were talking about was really part of a last gasp of a two to three hundred year European tradition. I did some research and was really blown away by at what I found. The first thing that really leapt out that was so fascinating was in the center of all of these English witch trials, which you see in "Witchfinder General" and all of these books all happened in the county of Essex, something like eighty percent of these pieces were in Essex, which just happened to be where the majority of these Puritans that came to the United States are from. This is why the county of Salem was called Essex, which really blew my mind! So I said, "What if this wasn't an American phenomenon, what if the old witches had come too and they were on the same boats?" At any rate, I came up with a really different approach that came down to the witches were real, but what if they were running the trial. That came from reading the transcripts of the trials, reading stuff from the period that just seemed weird, unanswered questions why certain Puritans that were involved in the same practices were never prosecuted, things like that. So, it was originally pitched to "Fox 21", who was the more cutting edge of the tv family, as it was doing shows like "Homeland", and "Sons Of Anarchy", of course. And they immediately got excited about it. But I also had zero experience in tv other than writing a pilot that people really liked but never got made, and they said, "We want to pair you with an experienced showrunner, but everybody wants him, he probably won't do it, but let us take a shot at it and see if you get along." That was Brannon Braga, and they sent him a twelve to thirteen page thing I had written just about the world it would take place in. I had known Brannon's work already doing a couple of seasons of "24" and he had done episodes of what I thought were the only good, more contemporary science fiction I had seen like "Threshold" and "Flash Forward". He really fell in love with it and we met, what I didn't realize was that Brannon was a life-long horror guy, and he never got to do a horror movie. We discussed the idea and got along instantly, so we worked on writing a pilot for Fox which then was sold to FX. We were going to be on FX, when out of the blue we were not the only horror show (Deep sigh). The network was really excited, and then the runner of "American Horror Story" decided to do one of their next seasons about witches, and he had mentioned he was going to do it in Salem, but they never did it. We had already written the pilot, and it was up in the air for a moment what would happen to the show, when all of a sudden WGN, which was actually run by the same people who ran FX had slipped the script to them. They were excited because they were looking for a way to launch a whole new network to define who they were with an new show. It worked well for us because they didn't just give us a chance for a pilot, they came to us and said, "We don't want to just shoot your pilot, we want thirteen episodes." And we were off to the races. So, on the other hand, were going to be seen on a network that only hit sixty percent of American homes, and people had never heard of it. But the upside was, we were going to get to tell the whole thirteen hour story and see if it worked, instead of getting a pilot that may or may not have been picked up. So it also explains the first Season which had choppy points because I had to write all thirteen hours in considerably less time than we could spend writing the pilot, which with the second season, we had more time to plan and pay it out to be more cohesive in thirteen chapters.
Rob: The way you created these women, they are almost like damaged superheroes. Was it always your intention to make this series a female empowering project, or do you feel that notion is misconstrued by the audience?
Adam: Well. you can't really separate these. I mean, the answer is yes,