“Teacup ”showrunner says series adaptation changes '90% of the book': 'It's a very different version'

Showrunner and EP Ian McCulloch stopped by EW's Comic-Con studio to preview the series alongside stars Yvonne Strahovski, Scott Speedman, and Chaske Spencer.

Teacup, Peacock's series adaptation of Robert R. McCammon's horror fiction novel Stinger, "will be a very different" version from the source material, according to showrunner and executive producer Ian McCulloch.

McCulloch stopped by Entertainment Weekly's 2024 Comic-Con studio alongside fellow EP James Wan and stars Yvonne Strahovski (who plays Maggie Chenowith), Scott Speedman (James Chenowith), and Chaske Spencer (Ruben Shanley) to tease the series, sharing that his version "changes 90% of the book."

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"And for some reason they went, 'Oh, great,'" McCulloch quips about Wan and his production company Atomic Monster, who approached him to tackle the adaptation.

"It’s a very different version," McCulloch, best known as a producer on Yellowstone, says. "The book’s a very big book. It’s got a lot of set pieces, a lot of characters. What I wanted to do was take all that away and keep the ideas of the book."

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McCulloch adds, "I wanted to make something where even if you read the book, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. Part of that was making a minimalist story. It was a maximalist piece of fiction. I made it very grounded. Instead of a town, it's three families, instead of a large area it's one secluded farm."

McCulloch wanted to keep his version "grounded so that when things start to go wrong or go supernatural, we’re starting from a level of very relatable human characters at ground level," he says.

Teacup will debut with two new episodes on Peacock on Oct. 10, which the showrunner and stars announced during a Comic-Con panel on Thursday. Per the streamer, the series will follow  "a disparate group of people in rural Georgia who must come together in the face of a mysterious threat in order to survive.”

Just how scary will the horror series be? "At the end of the day it's a drama," Wan tells EW, but there's also "some pretty creepy messed up things in this."

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Speedman says he had to "convince" McCulloch to let him be part of the project, while Strahovski admits she was initially "a little on the fence about doing something that was a genre piece, an ongoing series." However, "I read it and I was like, oh, this is different," Strahovski says of the "classy vision."

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