Sweet Tooth showrunner Jim Mickle believes Season 2 of the show is mixing even more themes than before. The first season of the adaptation of the comic book of the same name by Jeff Lemire premiered in 2021, and it was well received by fans and critics alike. In the sophomore run, Gus, the deer-human hybrid protagonist, is dealing with more complex problems as he’s looking to save the other hybrids and reunite with Jepperd. ComingSoon spoke with Mickle ahead of the new season’s release, and the showrunner explained how he manages to balance the light and dark aspects of an apocalyptic show like Sweet Tooth.

“As a deadly new wave of the Sick bears down, Gus (Christian Convery) and a band of fellow hybrids are held prisoner by General Abbot (Neil Sandilands) and the Last Men. Looking to consolidate power by finding a cure, Abbot uses the children as fodder for the experiments of captive Dr. Aditya Singh (Adeel Akhtar), who’s racing to save his infected wife Rani (Aliza Vellani),” reads the Sweet Tooth Season 2 synopsis.

“To protect his friends, Gus agrees to help Dr. Singh, beginning a dark journey into his origins and his mother Birdie’s (Amy Seimetz) role in the events leading up to The Great Crumble. Outside the Preserve, Tommy Jepperd (Nonso Anozie) and Aimee Eden (Dania Ramirez ) team up to break the hybrids free, a partnership that will be tested as Jepperd’s secrets come to light. As the revelations of the past threaten the possibility of redemption in the present, Gus and his found family find themselves on a collision course with Abbot and the evil forces that look to wipe them out once and for all.”

Tudor Leonte: Sweet Tooth has a unique blend of genres and themes. How did you balance those elements in the second season, and did you approach storytelling any differently than you did in the first season?

Jim Mickle: We had to balance it very carefully ’cause it could be a very dark season if we went full-on into that. A big part of the show, I think, is the light and the dark and the mix of those. I sometimes use the high-food cooking analogy of the spicy and the sweet, mixing those two and making sure that you have a little bit of both so that you can feel ’em. That’s a big part of it. I think using Gus as your point of view into the story and his very unique point of view is a big part of it.

There’s a lot of times that we definitely come up with a question like, ‘Is it Sweet Tooth? Does this feel Sweet Tooth?’ because oftentimes, especially with apocalyptic stories, you can tend to feel like that could happen in any show in a way. That was a question we came back to a lot, and even if you didn’t a hundred percent know what were the full ingredients of that, you sort of knew whether it was or not. That was a big part of it. I think we knew that Season 2 could be darker and could go more mature. The characters are grown up. Gus is more grown up, he’s seen a world now that he hadn’t seen in Season 1. That was a part of it. I found it really interesting coming out of Season 1, I started writing some of the same set of scenes or rhythms or sensibilities in some of those early scenes and very quickly started to go like, ‘I don’t know that we can do that. Gus is a different character now.’ He is different, and Christian is a different actor. Suddenly, you start to tell what the story wants it to be, I guess. All those things.

The first season was well-received by both critics and audiences. Did that influence your approach to the sophomore season and did you feel any added pressure going into it?

A little bit, but we were smart, and we started writing Season 1 before Season 2. We opened a writers’ room about a month or two before, just in case the show did well. There was this fun period where we were just kind of dreaming up what season two would be, and while that was happening, we were still finishing the edits of Season 2, and suddenly the show comes out, and you’re like, ‘I hope it does well.’ Then, we come in one Monday morning, it’s like, ‘Wow! I think the show did really well. I think people really liked it.’ Thankfully by then, we were already talking about, I think probably even Episode 2 or something. We avoided some of the pressures there.

The reality is it’s such hard work, and it’s so much, and you’re doing so much that you don’t get a lot of time, thankfully, to stop and think about the pressures of that. I think if you would, it would probably paralyze you, but you’re just in such a rush to get everything done, get scripts in order, get ready to shoot, and then by the time you start shooting, you’re just hanging on for dear life until basically today when the show comes out.