INTERVIEW: Todd Robbins has some ‘True Nightmares’ to share with TV audiences
Todd Robbins is a master of macabre, a purveyor of quirk, a performer fascinated with characters who sometimes head down dark, malevolent paths. His interest in this expansive field is the subject of the new Investigation Discovery series True Nightmares, which airs new episodes Wednesdays at 10 p.m.
“I was approached by Discovery Studios because of my background in kind of all kinds of unusual things,” Robbins said recently during a phone interview. “They wanted to focus on something related to the sideshow, and the irony of it was that the project we put together, they couldn’t sell it because everyone said it was too dark. The idea of a series about a sideshow was just too creepy.”
It took the sharing of footage from Robbins’ successful off-Broadway show, Play Dead, to convince the network that there was some promise in the concept of a show based on true nightmares. The resulting reality series focuses on three crimes per episode, coupling Robbins’ trademark narration with realistic reenactments.
“I had footage of the show that I did off-Broadway called Play Dead,” he said. “It was a show I wrote with Teller of Penn & Teller, and Teller directed me in it. And it was an evening of ghost stories about real people, real dead people that all had sorts of darkness in their lives. … And then as we were talking about what we should do with it [True Nightmares], I said, ‘It would be fun to put me in the reenactments, to ghost me in,’ as I put it. And so that I’m a presence there, almost like a little angel of death, that whenever I show up, something kind of dark and joylessly awful is going to happen. And so that’s sort of how the whole kind of concept came about.”
Robbins’ work on the show is akin to Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock and their influences on serialized television. “Shows like One Step Beyond kind of informed what we were doing and influenced the form of the show, and the result is True Nightmares,” he said.
In choosing the stories featured on the series, Robbins and the team pulled from real tales of infamy and lesser-known criminal cases. Sometimes a case needed to be dropped if another show on Investigation Discovery had covered its details already.
“It’s an interesting process in that a lot of people don’t realize that everything has to be sort of approved by Investigation Discovery because they have so many shows that are doing true crime that they have to kind of referee and traffic cop the whole thing to make sure that everyone’s not doing the same story,” Robbins said. “So there were a couple of stories that we thought would be fun. They went, ‘Oh, no, no. This has already been done or is being done by Wives With Knives,’ or whatever, one of their own shows. So eventually the list was whittled down, perhaps I should say distilled and refined, and the 18 stories that are being done in the six episodes were finalized.”
There are few themes among the tales except the commonality of “quirky, offbeat stories of dark humanity that have an ironic twist at the end of the telling.” Robbins called them unbelievable but true. “We have people that after the episodes will go running to InvestigationDiscovery.com to get more information and then end up Googling to make sure that we’re true in our telling that these are real stories,” he said.
He added: “I can creep you out with ghost stories, but at some point, when they’re fiction, you can kind of discount them, and it’s reality that gets under your skin because these things happened. And since they happened, there’s a possibility that they’ll happen again, and there’s always that possibility that it can happen to you. And I think that gives them weight and power to really get under people’s skin.”
The TV host grew up in a suburban neighborhood of Long Beach, Calif. The downtown area, as he remembers it, was falling apart and rundown. The outskirts had farms, and Robbins’ parents were looking for a place clean, safe, quiet and secure.
“And it was lovely,” he said. “It was very pleasant to grow up in. You know, the biggest concern was if a neighbor down the block didn’t mow his lawn on a regular basis, and things got a little seedy, there was a great turmoil in the neighborhood. And growing up there, it wasn’t the most exciting place, and I developed a love of character and this quirkiness for whatever reason.”
Robbins, when he was growing up, wanted to go downtown and see what life was like. He remembers the Pike, a “Coney Island of the West Coast,” that fascinated his interests. “Out of that grew this appreciation of all kinds of quirky things from magic, and sideshow, and old music, and con artistry, and spiritualism and everything that is just kind of rich in character,” he said.
Now, he finds himself at the helm of a reality series still exploring, still searching for answers. He doesn’t have cases that stand out more than the others; however, he did mention Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for the movie Psycho, and a “woman who spent a day at a local community pool, and things don’t go swimmingly.”
“And then there’s another story this week about the consequences of keeping secrets from the ones you love and how wrong that can go,” he said. “And I love them all. The first one I brought was actually the first story we did, which was in the first episode, which was Belle Gunness, who was a fascinating woman because she’s so dark, and so malevolent and so sinister.”
Robbins and the team look for those moments when a choice needs to be made, and the suspect heads down the wrong path.
The stories often come to life in the narrations and reenactments, and this has become a point of focus for Robbins. “Unlike some of the shows that have some celebrity hosts that come on, and you’re obviously standing in the studio … I’m there throughout the whole shoot,” he said. “Often I’d get a script that had straight narration for me to do. And it was like, ‘On Tuesday the 24th, Martha came home and found Ed in bed with his secretary. She was enraged.’ No, no. What is that? That doesn’t really tell us anything other than what we’re seeing. … What’s going on with Martha? What’s really happening there? And so it was like, ‘Martha came home early to prepare for a surprise birthday for Ed, but she was the one who really got the surprise.’ That’s the kind of thing that I thought was more interesting to say, so there was a lot of rewriting on the fly. … And that was just wonderful working with the writers and the executive producers.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
- True Nightmares airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on Investigation Discovery. Click here for more information.
