Lucifer showrunners tease season 5, explain season 6

At first, the people behind Lucifer didn’t want to do a sixth season, but when they thought of how it could improve the ending, they changed their mind.

In a month, Lucifer fans will be treated to the first half of the long-awaited season 5, which starts out with Lucifer trapped running Hell and Detective Chloe Decker heartbroken back on Earth. But as we saw in the recent season 5 trailer, that changes pretty quick as Lucifer returns.

Only no, because it’s actually Lucifer’s twin brother Michael, causing all kinds of havoc. “[Tom Ellis] plays it with very different physical mannerism and speech patterns, so it is this weird back-and-forth where he’s having this weird schizophrenic conversation with himself,” showrunner Ildy Modrovich told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s brilliant.”

And thus kicks off what promises to be very exciting season. “It’s our best season yet,” said Joe Henderson, the other showrunner. “It’s funny and dark and twisted and sad and joyous.”

That makes sense, since originally season 5 was going to be the show’s last. It sounds like the showrunners have packed it full of big swings, including a black-and-white installment, a meta episode where the priggish showrunner of a series about Satan solving crimes is murdered, and a musical episode, because every show has to have one of those eventually.

But the trick is that season 5 won’t be the final season: we’re getting season 6, as well, although it nearly didn’t happen. Netflix and WBTV approached Modrovich and Henderson while they were writing what was going to be the series finale, and asked if they had one more season in them. “It was very, very similar to when we went from 10 episodes to 16,” Henderson remembered. “[We were] like, ‘No, this is perfect. If we do this, it’ll ruin everything! Then three days later, you’re like, ‘Wait, how could we not have done this?'”

“What we realized is that the last bit of that [series] finale episode was actually a lot of great stories sped up just to give us a satisfying ending for all our characters,” Modrovich said. “We literally lobbed off Act 6 and went, ‘Let’s take what happens in Act 6 in a scene and dive into it, and really explore how are characters end up where they ended up.’ So, that ended up being our nugget for season 6.”

As Henderson explain sit, “[i]t’s the story we were always going to tell, but just written much larger and to me [now] so much more interestingly that it breaks my heart to think we weren’t [originally] going to do it this way.”

That sounds interesting to me. It reminds me of a criticism that often gets lobbed at the final season of Game of Thrones: that fans weren’t so much upset with what happened, exactly, but more that the show seemed to rush through these huge moments without building up to them, undercutting itself. It’s a tricky balance to strike; let’s hope Lucifer finds it.

And note that, according to Modrovich, expanding the story for one more year won’t affect season 5. “That was another request we had [for the studio and streamer]. We said, ‘Please don’t make us what change what we have. Please don’t make us water it down,’ because we were so pleased with it and it’s so impactful. Again, everybody was just very on-board with it.”

The first eight episodes of Lucifer season 5 drops on Netflix on August 21.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels