Forever creator previews the newest show about immortality

The idea of immortality has been explored in a number of ways on screens both big and small. But for Dr. Henry Morgan in ABCs new series Forever, immortality has a few twists. For one, Henry views it as a curse, something hes spent more than 200 years trying to cure. And then theres the idea that Henry does technically die. He just doesnt stay dead for long.

As a medical examiner in New York, Henry (Ioan Gruffudd) spends his days examining dead bodies and trying to find a solution for his inability to stay dead. And as viewers will see in the pilot, his years of practicing medicine and genius-like knowledge quickly get him pulled into helping a detective (Alana De La Garza) on a number of cases.

We caught up with Forevers creator, Matt Miller, to talk about the idea behind the show, what viewers can expect, and more.

EW: Where did the idea for Forever come from? MATT MILLER: I was putting my five-year-old son to bed one night and he asked me, Daddy, are you ever gonna die someday? as five-year-olds will do occasionally, and I said,No, of course not, Ill never die. I didnt want to upset him or anything, and then I realized, you know, youre supposed to kind of build trust through honesty, and all that sort of stuff. So I said to him, Okay, wait. I wasnt completely truthful. I will die someday, but it wont be for a very long time, and by then youll probably want me to be dead. At which point he burst into tears, my wife came running into the room, I was banished from the room, and she continued sort of raising our child, and I went off to try to come up with a TV show.

So I started playing around with that idea: What if a character, through some weird set of circumstances, wouldnt or couldnt die. And I started to think of like all the amazing things that you could do and how much fun it would be. And then I started to think but what would happen if my son wasnt immortal too? Would the pain of watching your family and friends, children and everything like that grow old and die, would that be too much? Would it ultimately prove to be more of a curse than a blessing? And that was sort of the initial impetus of the idea is to play with a character that was stuck with that unusual affliction, which is the thing that we all want on some level more than anything, and that he has it but sees it as more of a curse. And then the rest of it kind of extrapolated from there. I said, Well what kind of guy would he be and what would he do for a living? I sort of came upon the medical examiner thing [because] I thought it would be interesting if he was a doctor for all of these years and the medical examiner would give him access to the bodies. So hes a guy who couldnt die but was surrounded by death.

What about the idea of him being naked every time he comes back to life? We got lucky with the casting on that one. Not everyone you want to see come out of the water naked, but sort of the idea was, okay, well, if he dies every time, I was like, Can you just chop his head off? Does the ax break? How does that work? So I decided he should really die. He just keeps coming back, and if he kept coming back, like, in water, I thought it would just be an interesting kind of rebirth idea. And then the being naked part, it would have to be like a full rebirth. And to me, I sort of just thought it was funny. It would be a funny predicament of his affliction would be coming back in water, but hes always naked, and so it would lend itself to weird, awkward situations.

In general, would you say this series will have a procedural feel? Yeah, there was certainly a procedural element in the pilot but a lot of it was kind of unraveling who Henry is and then how Henry and Detective Jo Martinez, played by Alana De La Garza, were going to come into contact. And now that weve set that structure up in the pilot, we move forward with a more traditional procedural in the sense that every week theres a body, Henry is the M.E., she is the detective, we unravel and solve a crime every week, but then theres also some very non-traditional elements of our show. He cant die, your protagonist, or he does die every week but ends up coming back. Its not every week, but he does die a few times. He dies, like, four times in the pilot so that was a little excessive, and we start to pull back on that. Hell die, like, in the second episode, and then well take a few off, and well have special-occasion kind of deaths that will come up throughout the series. But we also get to utilize the flashback structure, which is that we get to see his life over the last 235 or so years.

Will there be flashbacks in every episode? Yeah, so every episode were going to tell our A story and then well tell a flashback story that will relate.

Is there any time period in particular that youre looking forward to exploring? In terms of time periods for the show, you know, the great love of [Henry's] life is a character named Abigail that we meet in the pilot. They met at the end of World War II around 1945, so we get to explore that relationship in the 1940s and as it continues into the 1950s, but we also have stories that take us back to like the tenements on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s or the 1890s and thats fun. Were talking about an episode right now that has like 1880s London because its a little bit of a Jack the Ripper episode, so that will be fun for us. Also, we want to tell stories about the Depression and the Roaring 20s and all of that. Its all really fun, interesting stuff that we get to dive into every week.

At the center of this show, Henry is trying to die. In your mind, does the series end when he figures that out? For me, the series ends when ABC tells us its over. [Laughs] But assuming that we get to play this out for a while, he wants to be looking for a way to end his affliction, but if he does come up with that way at some point, does he want to use it still? Has he found enough to live for where he doesnt actually want to be out? And thats something that well certainly explore throughout the course of the series. Solosing that character from the show gives us very little to play, so hopefully he wont actually die. But we will certainly play around with what happens if he does figure out a way scientifically out of this.

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Forever creator previews the newest show about immortality