Teacup Showrunner Ian McCulloch on Adapting an Intimate Horror Epic

On the set of Peacock horror series Teacup, everyone is mindful of spoilers. The crew is tight-lipped. Actors skirt around key plot details. Even the thespian dogs are careful not to bark anything that would tip the press off. When we sit down with series lead Scott Speedman in a conference room on the show’s Atlanta-area set, series’ creator and showrunner Ian McCulloch lurks in the background. As Speedman begins to add color to his character’s arc, McCulloch appears behind the glass door, puts one finger to his lips, and ominously locks eyes with his star. There will be consequences for letting secrets slip.

Now the mystery is closer to being revealed. The first four episodes of Teacup are currently streaming on Peacock and they finally give viewers their first look at the audacious adaptation of Robert R. McCammon’s sprawling 1988 horror epic, Stinger. The show brings several characters together, including Maggie Chenoweth (Yvonne Strahovski), James Chenoweth (Speedman), and their neighbors (Chaske Spencer, Diany Rodriguez, Luciano Leroux, Boris McGiver, and Holly A. Morris), as they huddle together on the Chenoweth farm to confront the threat of a monstrous masked figure.

When he wasn’t busy teasing his actors, McCulloch (Yellowstone) was generous with his time and sat down with Den of Geek, along with other members of the entertainment press who traveled to the set, to piece together his unique approach to adapting the source material (one spoiler we will give out: it borrows very little from the novel) and pacing a horror-tinted thriller for the streaming world. 

The below interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Adapting such a massive novel was no easy task, and McCulloch had an innovative approach to the challenge posed to him by fellow producer James Wan and his production company, Atomic Monster: he chose to jettison a good portion of the source material. 

“I read the book and I said, ‘I’m gonna go write your script; it’s going to be 99% not the book. You’ll recognize the basic conceit of the book, and if you hate it, then we won’t do it. If you love it, then we’ll see what we can do.’” explains McCulloch. “And now we’re here.”

McCulloch’s choice had nothing to do with the quality of the original story, however. It was simply too big for the screen. “The book is huge, in all manner of hugeness!” he says. “It’s very referential to things that came out around the time it was written: The Outsiders, Terminator, Alien. And it’s all big setpieces. If you made a very strict adaptation of the book, it would cost $500 million. If you take a hugely produced song, and then you do an acoustic guitar version, it still works. It’s a good song.”

In the end, the tale of survival was much more interesting to McCulloch than the deep mythology of the story. “​​Take away the town, take away vehicles, take away power, take away everything, and then how do these people survive? That story of isolation and survival without being prepared: that was more interesting to me,” says McCulloch. “The hardest part was the mythology. Sticking to very strict rules, you have to first create those rules, and then once you’ve created them, you either have to adhere to them, or if you need to change them somewhere then you have to make sure everything else doesn’t fall down.”

McCulloch admits that there’s a fine line between enticing Teacup’s audience with the question of what’s really going on and drawing out the answer too long. “There’s only so long you can hide the ball, but by the end of the first episode, you will not know this is about [SPOILER REDACTED],” he says. “By the end of the third episode, you probably have a good idea that it might be.”

One more immediate question viewers and readers might have concerns the title of the show: why Teacup? McCulloch explains that it’s both a thematic concept and a desire to differentiate the TV series from the novel. 

“Basically, it’s the barrier. ‘Tempest in a teacup’ is a turn of phrase. I’ve always wanted to make something called Teacup, but I didn’t know what. Sometimes you just write something down and then years later: this and this go together. Stinger is a very nice title, but this is not Stinger. It’s a real amount of remix. I wanted to give this its own identity.”

The first four episodes of Teacup are available to stream on Peacock now. Episodes 5 and 6 premiere October 24 and episodes 7 and 8 premiere October 31.