MTV’s Teen Wolf Season 6
The Ask: Teen Wolf's 6th and final season deals a lot with memory and nostalgia: For starters, most of the monsterized teenage protagonists are prepping to go their separate ways with high school graduation looming. Sad. But even worse! new villains in the form of psychedelic kidnapper cowboys who erase their victims from both memory and existence by trapping them in an invisible cloud-borne train station (I kid you not), the Ghost Riders, have literally blown into town just in time to royally mess up everyone’s plans for homecoming. I loved working on this show.
The campaign absolutely had to leverage this sense of nostalgia and impending dread, as both the show’s characters and its rabid fanbase would definitely be feeling it. We also wanted to really ramp up the stakes—this would really be a last ride narrative, again, both in the universe for the show’s characters and out here in the real world for its massive and very engaged fan community. We had the tagline, and the entire thesis of the campaign for that matter, almost immediately: remember.
Role: Art director, writer, director
To set the table, we quickly cut a teaser recycling iconic locations from both the show and promos past, building to a chilling soundbite of one our characters, terrified, barely able to eek out our one-word tag. This would also be the reveal that it would in fact be the show’s final season.
Phase 2 consisted of one of my favorite social stunts I’ve ever been lucky enough to be a part of. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all agreed to let us “hide” Teen Wolf’s accounts, making it appear as though the show’s social media presence had just disappeared. With no real fanfare, we launched a “Beacon Hills Museum” IG account, consisting of props, locations, and memorabilia from past seasons photographed to look like an museum catalog. Some of these posts contained hidden time codes from past episodes in the form of catalog numbers, that added up to a secret phrase. We figured it it would take ~week for the fans to crack the code. Working together, they did it in about a day. It was awesome to watch. This then reactivated the social accounts, as well as unlocked a new promo and trailer.
That promo further riffed on the museum conceit, literally taking the viewer through a night gallery of the show’s most fearsome villains and most brutal moments, culminating in the gang’s beloved Jeep under attack from the Ghost Riders’ signature lightning. The worst was yet to come, indeed.
Teen Wolf Season 6 was far and away the highest rated and best reviewed season of the show
The Outcome:
• Teen Wolf Season 6 opened to the biggest numbers of the show’s run, with massive growth in audience and engagement across show and network social channels.
• Though plans for an immersive Beacon Hills Museum experience at NY ComicCon had to be scrapped due to logistical and budgetary concerns, the show still had a huge and successful showing at that year’s convention.
• I came this close to licensing “Ghost Rider” by the seminal New York synth punk band Suicide for the promo. This close.
Teen Wolf S6 at NY ComicCon
I still can’t believe we got away with that Inland Empire-inspired logo animation
Credits
Ted McGrath: Art Director, Writer, Director
Anna MacDonald: Writer, Director
Chris Gallagher: Animator
Molly Cranna: Photographer