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“Wynonna Earp” returns Sunday night on Syfy — two years after its Season 3 finale. The long delay was caused by financial troubles at IDW Entertainment, which produces the supernatural Western series, says creator/showrunner Emily Andras. “It was insane,” Andras tells The Post. “I feel like ‘Wynonna Earp’ has always been cursed but [also] blessed. We …
“Wynonna Earp” returns Sunday night on Syfy — two years after its Season 3 finale.
The long delay was caused by financial troubles at IDW Entertainment, which produces the supernatural Western series, says creator/showrunner Emily Andras.
“It was insane,” Andras tells The Post. “I feel like ‘Wynonna Earp’ has always been cursed but [also] blessed. We were this odd little genre Western show, and the first season struggled to find a bit of an audience.
“The second season our incredible lead, Melanie Scrofano, was pregnant, which was a surprise, so we had to unexpectedly do a bunch of rewriting. Season 3 went well and we got greenlit for not one but two seasons from the network, and then we found out we had financial trouble.
“It was nothing I had ever heard of in this industry — of the network wanting a product and the studio saying, ‘We’re not sure we can afford to make it.’
“It was really fraught.”
Based on a comic book of the same name, the series follows demon hunter Wynnona Earp (Scrofano), who’s the great-granddaughter of legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. In Purgatory — her aptly-named hometown near the Canadian Rockies — Wynonna must battle “revenants,” or reincarnated outlaws that were killed by Wyatt Earp.
Season 4 sees Wynonna having to step up to save the town and rescue everyone she loves, including her sister, Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), who was left in peril at the end of last season.
“We’ve moved up to 10 p.m., so [this season will be] a little more graphic, a little more violent, a little more sexy and we’ve got a couple more f-bombs,” Andras says. “It’s still got that ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ [and] Tarantino fun. Lots of comedy, lots of crazy twists and turns, lots of classic comic book cliffhangers.
“If anything, the break between Season 3 and 4 allowed me to go back and realize what people really love about the show,” she says. “It’s the characters and their relationships to one another. That, more than anything, is what we have put front and center in Season 4.”
The show was ultimately able to resume thanks to Cineflix Studios, which came on board to co-produce, though Andras attributes their interest largely to efforts from the show’s fans, who call themselves “Earpers.”
“The premise of ‘Wynonna Earp’ is taking a traditional Western genre and repopulating it with people who haven’t normally been part of that, whether they’re diverse or female or LGBTQ,” she says. “I think a lot of genre fans who fit those labels have kind of adopted the show or fallen in love with it. So they understand already what it is to be marginalized and an underdog and how to fight for something.
“There were so many things [the Earpers] did,” she says. “They bought over 250 billboards all across North American, most notably in LA and in Times Square. I think [Cineflix Studios] saw that the show was so beloved and had been under-marketed in a lot of areas. There’s a real moment here that the show was gaining fans and gaining momentum and [earned] a lot of critical acclaim.
“It’s pretty gratifying as a storyteller to have made something that makes people feel like that,” she says. “That’s all you can ever hope when you put content out into the world — that when people love something so much, they’ll go to battle for it.”
