The initial season of HERCULES: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS wrapped with a new character introduced on a three episode are. Lucy Lawless, an unknown New Zealand actress, was cast as Xena, a female warlord who sets out to kill Hercules, the only man who can prohibit her from conquering Arcadia.

"It was very much a struggle, at first, to finally get XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS on the air," admits producer Rob Tapert. "There were very few traditional 'women-as-hero' shows and they had not done particularly well. I wanted to try a tough woman character so we debuted her on HERCULES. Once the studio saw her, they instantly suggested that we do a spin-off. There was some resistance, but, ultimately, some guys from the Tribune Group thought it was a good idea and they fell in line."

A fan of Hong Kong action films, Tapert was inspired by the Asian market's kinetic, female-driven fare, e.g. the SWORDSMAN trilogy and THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR. "I thought there were elements in those that I could use in crafting the woman villain," says Tapert. "We subsequently worked on XENA and I realized the take would be to do a woman who is evil, and turns good, and make her the superhero. It allowed Xena to go forward. It all fell into place, at least in my mind and the writing staff's mind. This was a tale of redemption told from the point of view of a woman who's a mass murderer. It gave us, in terms of writing, a big backdrop and a lot of character traits to play with. At least at the time, it was different from anything on television."

In traditional fashion, the murderous but repentant Xena was supposed to have been killed-off at the end of the HERCULES trilogy. But the decision to spin-off the character, with her own series, prompted a quick rewrite.

In September, 1995, XENA's first episode--Sins of the Past--was televised on syndicated stations across the country. Gabrielle, the Warrior Princess' sidekick, was played by Texas-born Renee O'Connor (FF 7:3), whose previously performed in DARKMAN II: RETURN OF DURANT, a sequel spawned by a horror franchise co-produced by Tapert and longtime partner Sam Raimi.

"XENA is the number one rated show in the universe," grins Tapert. '"You're always surprised when something works and you're always shocked when it doesn't. I was surprised by the success, and I'm always surprised at what people like and don't like about it."

Unlike Tapert's fore-runner, XENA was comparatively more violent and its sexual content less restrained. The viscera and raciness were later subdued to demographically appeal to its core audience (i.e. young girls). "The differences between XENA and HERCULES blurred," relates Tapert, "because we demystified Hercules a little bit by making him not so much the 'ever-so-right' good guy. The real differences are Here was a good guy and Xena was a bad guy. Here is the story of somebody protecting us from monsters and bad guys. Xena is the good guy we hope is inside ourselves, meaning we've all done bad things and we all need some amount of atonement. So Xena is the hero we hope we can be, and Here's the hero who's out there beating up the bad guys.

"In the past, I would say that XENA had more violence. There's different styles of fighting between the two. Xena tends to be more acrobatic and Herc more powerful. XENA has probably more weapons in it. Xena kills more, and gets away killing more then Herc does."

In regard to XENA's oscillation from solemnity to slapstick, Tapert assents, '"there is a part of me that says, "You're much better off doing a comedy every Single week,' and, there's another part of me that likes to tell dramatic stories that are different from anything that is on TV. Even on HERCULES they were really dark stories. We try to balance it by doing a couple of dark ones, then a couple of lighter shows and some straightforward, standard XENA adventures like where the bad warlord has to be put down. I do like to keep that mix. This season was going to be a little darker, and I keep winding it back to a little lighter.

"It's interesting. The studio did a bunch of research over the summer, contacting the actual people who watch the show and it turned out that people enjoyed the comedies more than the dark drama. Not by much. It was like 55 to 45%. I feel we can get away with different tones as long; as they're not boring.

"Sometimes you try things that don't exactly work. Some of them just weren't that appealing to me. Jeez, I'm going to get myself in trouble with the writers. We did a couple that I wasn't all that fond of. We did one the second season called The Execution that I didn't like, and another Vanishing Act--;just wasn't funny enough. We did another comedy, Thims, Thims and Jims that made me laugh because it was so stupid.

"I didn't like King Con, it didn't work for me. I don't like the romantic XENA stories, they don't work for me. A story set against gambling and doing a sting just wasn't a good idea. Sometimes the stories don't interest me, I find them lame and boring. There are things in every episode that we wish we had done something different."

Tapert also had reservations about The Bitter Suite, a sort of musical revue which was the second installment of a dark, two part story launched with Maternal Instincts: " In that one, we failed to set up at the beginning how bad Xena felt, and I didn't feel she needed to kill Gabrielle. I didn't emotionally believe it. Once we got into the musical, I followed the singing and dancing and all that but the initial set-up always bugged me. So I'm putting a recap of the previous episode for when it eventually plays on USA. There are all those elements that, in any given episode, you want to change."

Cast as the title character, Lucy Lawless' popularity has burgeoned into comic boob tie-ins and toy merchandise. "Certainly the more we pushed the envelope, the more we asked out of Lucy," says Tapert. "The more we got, the more we liked, so the more we added to it. Now what I like about the show is the relation between Xena and Gabrielle, and how we play with that relationship. How they interact. I don't think there is any show on television that has such a wide range, and it comes really from the story lines.

"Lucy continues to surprise me all the time. What attracted us was her performance in the first two-hour Here movie we shot, HERCULES AND THE AMAZON WOMEN. She had a minor role in that, and then she went off and did something and wasn't available for a long time. When she came back, we put her in a couple of HERCULES movies and she was just great. In one of them, she played a bad girl who gave Hercules a potion that made him blind; she was really good in that. Somebody else had originally been cast to play Xena because we had just used Lucy. When that person fell out, we slotted-in Lucy and the rest is history.

"The biggest single surprise is her true dramatic range. I actually think Lucy is just a great comedienne, who knows how to do physical comedy--and that's very rare. In order to do comedy, you've got to strip yourself of all pretense. You're at your most vulnerable because you have to be ugly or stupid or something, to make people laugh. Lucy also has true dramatic range: she can handle being the bad guy, the caring mother, the best friend."

As each new season approaches, the producer's primary challenge is "coming up with concepts" that add longevity to the Nielsens: "We ask ourselves, 'What haven't people seen? What are we going to do with the characters?' It's finding ways to make it fresh for the audience because if we really just did the same show week after week, people would get bored of it. That's the one thing that I wanted for Herc and Xena. When you tuned in each week, you wouldn't know if this was going to be funny or dark. That was my goal: to have a show that would have a wide enough tapestry that you could laugh and cry at the same time.

Tapert admits that his involvement with the writers is "far closer than they wish. I'm involved in every beat sheet. I'm involved in every draft of the script, and I give extensive notes. I work with the editing and follow through on every single episode, editorially-specifically every key one, those episodes that are going to be in the sweeps week or leading into them."

The characters broached the cartoon medium in a film released by Universal Home Video, HERCULES AND XENA: THE BATTLE FOR MOUNT OLYMPUS. While Tapert and Sam Raimi served as executive producers, the film was made independently. "It was a good learning experience in animation for us," recounts Tapert, "because there is some stuff that I loved--and some stuff that I just have to close my eyes for. I wish they'd let us do another, because now I know what I would do differently. I would disregard any 'kid' aspect to it. I thought they did a nice job with Xena but I think Hercules, Gabrielle and Iolaus were all not very interestingly drawn. They tried something with color backgrounds that just made it look cheesy, like '60s animation. But there were some really beautiful sequences in it, too. If I got to do it again, I would do a much harder story animated."

There are times when Tapert has no choice but to negotiate Lawless' near-inflexible schedule: "Once a year, Lucy has to go to NAPTE--which is the sales organization in New Orleans or Las Vegas--so we generally have to do at least one episode that doesn't have to have her in it. If we know that there are going to be some really difficult episodes, we try to design one or two to give Lucy a little bit of time off because she is often in almost every single shot--like the two openers for this season. That gets tough on a regular TV schedule. Kevin Sorbo, oddly enough--due to a medical condition--is much more limited in the number of hours he can work. I adually think Lucy has the most difficult job in one-hour television right now. I know David Duchovny would argue that he's got the longest schedule, but I think both of them have those bragging rights. He doesn't, however, have the physical but he does have the hours."

The lesbian community has been gravitated to the ambiguous "relationship" between Xena and Gabrielle (explored by women, who share sapphic lifestyles, in FF 7:3). Sample this exchange in one episode: bewildered by the relationship, Ares-the God of War--points to Gabrielle, turns to Xena and says, "I still don't see what you see in her." But Tapert insists, We're not really playing to that audience. There is love relationship, meaning there's no question that Xena and Gabrielle love each other and are willing to lie down their lives for each other. But I don't necessarily want to say that they have a sexual relationship, either. There's no question that it is a story of the love between two characters, but, if there's a sexual relationship between them, it's none of my business."

Since syndicated television isn't monitored by the censorial watchdogs that plague network-m, XENA leans more on self-policing to dispense with material that series' affiliates, advertisers and Universal television may gauge as objectionable. The Gauntlet episode is a case in point: betrayed by her troops, Xena must suffer the ravages of running the gauntlet, a path lined with warriors who pummel her as she runs through their ranks. "That scene was trimmed--and it was trimmed by me," Tapert adds emphatically. "No one was pushing me. It was one of the few times that I saw something that we had shot that was too strong, even though my hand was all over that episode. I pushed the director and the writer to write this because they wanted to redeem the character. They wanted her to go off with the baby at the end and I said, "You guys are out of your fucking minds.' We did shoot it. It was a really rough sequence, and I did trim it back and I tried to play it with very low sound effects and make the music counterpoint to the violence ...make it operatic in it's feel and tone.

So is XENA burdened with any taboos? "Not as long as everything's handled intelligently," shrugs the producer. "There are no standards and practices. This is first-run syndicated television. We get away with more than network television. I got away with some bare butt in the second episode of XENA this season. I got away with a lot of blood. There was an arm we chopped off, on one of last year's HERCULES episodes, that I was surprised we got away with. But there was some stuff that I didn't get away with. I had to chop footage from a XENA episode, Doctor of the House, which involved the cesarean birth of a centaur. We had to chop that out. But I have to say, for the most part, that we haven't had much censorship problems outside of that. We censor ourselves."

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