'Good Behavior' creator previews Season 2 finale
Good Behavior creator Chad Hodge always knew he wanted Letty (Michelle Dockery) to cross the line she said she never would — killing someone — but he didn’t know when. When he introduced Teo (Juan Riedinger) as Season 2’s villain, the person out to murder hit man Javier (Juan Diego Botto), Hodge decided immediately that Letty had to be the one to put a bullet in him. At first he thought it’d make a great cliffhanger for the final episode of the year. But about six weeks before they were shooting last week’s penultimate hour, he decided to move it up.
As viewers saw, Letty not only killed Teo in self-defense, but she also panicked and killed a security company worker (guest star Brian Baumgartner) who had terrible timing. He showed up at the house a day early, as Teo lay dead on the floor. “We always like to twist things around, not for the sake of a twist, but like Letty killing Teo for self-defense — he’s the bad guy of the season; it’s satisfying but it’s not totally unexpected. It doesn’t really put her or Javier in a major predicament. It’s like, ‘Yes, great, we killed the bad guy. Now moving on,'” Hodge tells us. “But to put them in another situation of, ‘Oh, s***, now we have something we need to deal with that we did not plan on’ — that is really how a lot of our stories unfold: These two people, Letty and Javier, who are by definition criminals in different ways, get stuff thrown at them. So just when she’s killed the bad guy of the season and, great, now they can move on, how do we throw a wrench in this? Oh, the security guy walks in and she shoots him too. Letty not only kills one person, she kills two people within the span of 10 seconds. We just laughed our asses off when we came up with that in the [writers’] room, like, ‘Oh, my God, can we do this? Can we do this?’ That’s how it always happens on our show: We come up with these things that we think are hilariously dark and crazy, and they’re not really pitched as ideas that we would actually do — they’re more pitched to make each other laugh — and then we actually do them.”
Baumgartner — who Hodge was happy auditioned for the role because he’d told the show’s casting director to look for someone “like Kevin from The Office” — will have a bigger role than you might expect in Sunday’s season finale. “I’m not going to go cast Kevin from The Office just to shoot him and then have [him disappear],” Hodge says with a laugh. “He sort of becomes a manifestation of Letty’s alter ego. It’s sort of like her bargaining and negotiating with her own morality.”
Hodge teases that the finale picks up right where we left off. “Michelle is so amazing in this moment. She’s slunk against that door and she goes through a spiral of [emotions]. First she tries to lie to Javier about what happened and he says, ‘Is that true?’ Her next move is ‘Maybe I’ll just kill myself.’ I mean, you can imagine if you killed two people that one of your first thoughts is going to be maybe I should just kill myself, especially for someone like Letty, who has tried so hard to be good and it’s like pushing a boulder up a hill for her,” he says. “She has gone to so many great lengths to try to fit in to normal society, to be a mother, to be all these things that she’s supposed to be, and now she’s just killed two people, so she really feels like giving up, and Javier stops her from doing that. Then [it becomes] the two of them trying to figure out what to do and how to get rid of these bodies. The finale is very much Letty in her head dealing with who she is, what she’s done, and where she can go from here.”
The Good Behavior Season 2 finale airs Dec. 17 at 10 p.m. on TNT.
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