How Peacock's Terrifying New Horror Series Teacup Is Sticking to the "Jaws School" of Storytelling

Peacock's upcoming sci-fi horror series Teacup is shrouded in mystery — for a good reason. The series, which is set to premiere on the streamer on October 10, is loosely based on Robert R. McCammon's 1988 novel Stinger. "Loosely" being the key word.

When SYFY WIRE attended a set visit at Universal's Assembly Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, alongside other outlets earlier this year, we spoke with showrunner and executive producer Ian McCulloch, who previously served as a consulting producer on Chicago Fire and Yellowstone. While there, he explained to us the method behind the madness of adapting a 600-plus-page novel into a half-hour episodic series.

As McCulloch tells it, executive producer James Wan — under his Atomic Monster production banner — came to McCulloch with the rights to Stinger and asked if he'd be interested in adapting it into a television series. 

How similar is Teacup to Stinger?

"I read the book and I said, 'I’m gonna go write you a script. It’s gonna be 99 percent not the book; you’ll recognize the basic conceit of the book and if you hate it, then we won’t do it, and if you love it, then we’ll see.' And now we’re here," McCulloch said.

Not using "99 percent" of the book wasn't due to any perceived inefficiencies. Instead, the book was an embarrassment of riches — it was too big.

"The book is huge in all manner of hugeness," he explained. "It’s very referential to things that came out around the time it was written, be it The Outsiders, Terminator, Alien, and it’s just big set pieces and would cost — if you made that book, [if] you made a very strict adaptation of that book, it would cost $500 million or something insane."

Ultimately, McCulloch said he's not interested in being a "stenographer," simply copying the Stinger storyline word for word and presenting it to the audience. Instead, he compared it to taking "a hugely produced song and then you do an acoustic guitar version of it."

What horror movies inspired Teacup?

"It still works because it’s a good song," he continued. "And this still works because it’s a really good idea. So the challenge was [to] take everything away and 'What do you have?' Take away the town, take away vehicles, take away power, take away everything and then, 'How do these people survive?' And that to me is more in line with what my favorite [stories do]. Alien, they’ve got nothing. The Thing, they’ve got nothing. That sort of story of isolation and survival without being prepared. That was more interesting to me." 

Caleb Dolden as Arlo Chenoweth, Luciano Leroux as Nicholas Shanley, and Emilie Bierre as Meryl Chenoweth in TEACUP. Photo: Mark Hill/Peacock

The most difficult part of crafting the series was the mythology, he said. Revamping Stinger to be Teacup meant building a whole new mythology from the ground up, a task McCulloch good-humoredly referred to as "impossible."

To get over the daunting task set before him, McCulloch created a "very strict" set of rules. 

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"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 in Episode 3, 4, 5, 6, then you have to make sure everything else [is sound]," he explained. "It’s a house of cards — it doesn’t fall down. That was the thing that was the most challenging, at least for me.

"There were things that we tweaked along the way but ... from the beginning, the idea has been 'less is more,' kind of like the Jaws school of thinking. Or Alien ... You see as little as possible for as long as possible." 

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