As we have been reporting, Syfy’s new scripted show Alphas is scheduled to premiere on Monday, July 11 after the mid-season and season premieres of Eureka and Warehouse 13. SciFi Mafia recently attended a Q&A panel with Alphas Executive Producer Ira Steven Behr (The 4400, Crash), and cast members Ryan Cartwright (Bones, Mad Men) and Azita Ghanizada (Psych, NCIS: LA) to find out a little bit more about their specific characters and the show in general.

First, a quick reminder from Syfy about the premise of the show:

Alphas is an action-packed thriller from writers Zak Penn (The Avengers, X-Men: The Last Stand) and Michael Karnow.  In the series, five ordinary people are brought together to form one extraordinary team of Alphas — people with the unique power to stretch the capabilities of the human mind giving them superhuman physical and mental abilities.

Operating within the Defense Criminal Investigation Service of the U.S. Department of Defense and led by preeminent neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Lee Rosen (Emmy Award-winner and Academy Award-nominee David Strathairn), an expert in Alpha phenomena, the team investigates cases that point to others with Alpha abilities. As they work against the clock to solve this new brand of crime, they must prevent their own personality differences and disparate backgrounds from interfering with their ultimate mission to catch the enemy.

One of the most notable clarifications about the show came fairly early on; this is NOT a superheroes show. The abilities were referred to by the panelists as “neuroconditions.” That alone shifts this show from the X-men/Heroes mold into more of the “these people have SKILLS” mold. Honestly, I’m a little disappointed but maybe this will save the show from becoming ridiculous or silly or too eye-rolling.

RedEye asked Ryan Cartwright about developing his character, whose name is Gary, and how Gary compared to Mr. Nigel Murray, his character on Bones:

Obviously the first thing that came up was the fact that he is autistic. And I’m not sure Nigel Murray was. I think he was just a bit mad, see? I think he was a little bit just eccentric.

But this guy is like 32 on the Karr scale and that was the first thing that I had to tackle just because if you’re playing anything like that you have to go in with a lot of respect and it was fascinating actually just getting to research that. I just read a load of books on the subject and saw a lot of documentaries and stuff and spoke to advisors.

And it was really good actually. It got me thoroughly interested in neuroscience and stuff, which is great for this job because it’s like every week there’s a new kind of extreme neuro condition that we get to investigate. So what was lovely was like once I had researched the condition/syndrome part of it, it was really good piecing together Gary to the point where I could actually give him a good sense of humor and lift him like all actors say, you want to lift the guy off the page and not have him.

You don’t want to play the syndrome, you want to play the character and the person. And the way it was written as well was really good. He had a voice already there. So yes, it was a really good challenge but a fun challenge and now he’s up and running it’s really good to be Gary every day.

Pop Culture Zoo asked Azita Ghanizada about her preparation for her part:

Because I got the part last and everybody was already up here and god, I was scared sh*tless. So I read the script I don’t know, a dozen times between the day I got it on the plane and the first day of shooting.

I think I was really up the second day was Rachel’s entire introduction. And I kind of started to look online for different things in regards to people that actually have the ability to super see and hear. I did a little bit of work on echolocation.

Yes. And kind of saw how people’s bodies physically passed out as they were hearing/seeing with their ears and then kind of tweaked that into Rachel as much as possible as far as trying to find her abilities and how to do that as honest and human as possible.

So I just kind of looked at all that stuff online and really kind of tried to look at the news and documentaries and things that were, people that actually had abilities or are really known for things like being able to hear really well or see microscopic pieces of writing on microscopic pieces of rice and all that stuff and how they just did it really honestly.

Then I watched a bunch of sci-fi stuff like scanners and all those things and just tried to tap into you know, what other people were doing in the past and what’s been done before and just kind of have a general understanding of it.

As for the show in general, Blastr asked Ira Behr about the direction for the season:

Yes, that’s the question. Well, oddly enough in about 3-1/2 hours I will be going into the network and pitching the final episodes of the season and telling the network where the series is going.

So I’m going to be very interested to see if they agree with us. One of the things that really appeals to me about the show is you know, in line with some of the other stuff that I’ve done is that this is a show that is going to evolve and is always evolving and is not a cookie cutter kind of series where every episode is exactly the same and plays out basically as the episode the week before and the episode the week after.

So this show is evolving. It evolves in five episodes and it’ll evolve more when we get to the tenth episode. And so I think what’s obviously going to happen without giving anything away is this is a group of people who are not really your first choice to be an investigative unit or to be going out into the field and getting shot at as Ryan said.

They are kind of working for the government but the government doesn’t totally know whether to trust them, they don’t know whether to trust the government. They’re working against this organization of alphas called Red Flag and Red Flag keeps telling them that they’re on the wrong side. And it’s a very precarious position to be in.

And as we like to say in the writers office, the center cannot hold. Eventually you know, things are going to start cracking. You know cracks are going to appear on the surface and I think by the end of season one there will be cracks appearing all over the surface.

Both Ira Behr and Ryan Cartwright are very enthusiastic about the humor of the show, that there is a fair amount but that it’s dry, and natural, and not silly. I asked Ira Behr if he is familiar with their lead-in shows Eureka and Warehouse 13 and if Alphas is different in tone:

Ira Behr: Well, I’m not totally familiar. I have seen a couple of episodes of each. I think they’re both lighter in tone. We have a lot of humor in our shows but our shows do tend at times to get dark in their plotlines. I think we’re the 10:00 show and we deserve to be the 10:00 show. That said, I do think we all share this kind of character driven humor and obviously we’re all ensemble shows. So we have similarities and some strong differences.

I asked if the tone of the series changes over the span of the season, and if there have been any adjustments to the initial plan.

Ira Behr: Well, the show evolves every week and the show is different every week. I mean we could have a really kind of tense, like I said, dark episode.

And then we do an episode which has the title Bill & Gary’s Excellent Adventure, which gives you an idea that it might not be the darkest show in the history of television where Bill and Gary go off on an assignment or not even an assignment and get to work together. So you know, I think that the episodes are a little different from week to week.

And the show is evolving you know, at a pace that you know, I had hoped for and expected it to. In terms of the actors, actors always impact on characters and you find relationships that work. Certainly since I’ve already mentioned it, the Bill and Gary relationship has kind of sparked all the writers. There is a nice give and take there that we’re kind of writing toward and enjoying.

You know, but actors always impact on how you view the characters and what an actor brings to the character is so real compared to what you have in your imagination. It’s suddenly there and they’re doing it and you start seeing things that you might not have expected and that’s part of the fun of the process.

Okay, so it’s not a superhero show, but there is some darkness, some science, some dry humor, and what looks like a nice bad-guys-trying-to-bring-good-guys-over-to-their-side dynamic going on. What do you think? Keep an eye here on SciFi Mafia and you’ll be seeing a review that may give an indication of how well they pull this off.

Alphas premieres on Monday, July 11 at 10/9c on Syfy.