"Being Human" Is The Little Genre Show That Could

Being Human star Sam Witwer discusses the sacrifices that the show’s actors and crew made in order to make the show’s final season possible — and why the end is bittersweet.

The cast of Being Human: Sam Witwer, Meaghan Rath, Kristen Hager, and Sam Huntington.

Art Streiber/Syfy

The first thing fans mourning the end of Syfy's Being Human should know is that the series could have continued on for another season past the April 7 finale. The second, more important thing is that a potential fifth season — much like ghost Sally brought back to corporeal life — would have been a rapidly decaying shell of its former self. With a tighter budget, the cast and crew of Being Human had to make the fourth season the show's final one in order to maintain the standard of quality that they held dear.

The end of Being Human may be bittersweet, but it's exactly what the show needed to go out on top. As Sam Witwer, who plays resident vampire Aidan Waite, explained, this was a decision born out of genuine love for the series.

"We all sort of felt each other out to see how we felt about it, we went to Syfy and said, 'Listen, we can give you one more good [season]. Anything more would be disastrous, would not be a good show,'" Witwer said. "So we asked for permission to end the show in the fourth season, because we all cared way too much about the show to see it go down in flames in a fifth season. They agreed that we could do that, and I really applaud them for being sympathetic to our creative interest there. It's not a very usual thing that a corporation gives a shit."

Vampires drink milkshakes too.

Pana Pantazidis/Syfy

To say that Being Human had a limited budget is perhaps an understatement: This was a high-stakes supernatural drama on a basic cable network. And while intentionally bad CGI schlock may work for Syfy's original movies (like Twitter favorite Sharknado), Being Human was a bit more grounded in reality — albeit a preternaturally enhanced reality with vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and then some.

Between the third and fourth seasons, Being Human's already slim budget was reduced, leading to an important conversation between showrunners Jeremy Carver and Anna Fricke, and Being Human stars Witwer, Meaghan Rath (Sally, ghost), Sam Huntington (Josh, werewolf), and Kristen Hager (Nora, another werewolf). How much further could Being Human go with limited funds?

"We don't ever really have a sense for how much the home office understands how difficult the show is to make, because everyone says their show is difficult, right?" Witwer said. "But we really meant it. The budget that we had, even to begin with, was very modest, very scant, and we had to improvise and kind of pull rabbits out of our hats in order to do the show."

When Syfy agreed to let Being Human's fourth season be its last, emotions were mixed: On the one hand, the writers had an opportunity to end the series, characterized by complicated character arcs and intensely fraught relationships, on their own terms. On the other hand, the show would be over, a decision that was kept from viewers until February of this year.

But as sad as it was to say good-bye to Aidan, Witwer acknowledged a sense of relief as well. Being Human was a tremendous amount of work for everyone involved, with the cast and crew consistently going above and beyond to make the show happen. The series was very much a passion project — and with a minuscule budget, passion can only take you so far.

"To put it in perspective, have I spent my own money on the show? Yes," said Witwer. "Have I done forced calls that never went on the books to help the budget? Yes, I have. Has Sam Huntington put up an actor at his house? Yes. Like all kinds of things that you don't really hear about unless you're doing an independent movie, those are all the things that we had to do to make the show. Did I take a camera crew out and shoot second unit and shoot a scene that I directed myself? Sure. Were we constantly improvising and calling in favors and having people work for less money than they're worth? Yes."

(When asked for comment, producer Irene Litinsky clarified, "Everyone who worked on Being Human gave 110% effort, and the production followed normal scheduling practices, which did sometimes require and receive special efforts from some of the cast and crew. Such scheduling adjustments are often preferred and frequently requested to achieve an earlier release at the end of a work week and all are compensated accordingly.")

"These are all the things that you only have in a situation where people really care," Witwer continued. "We were prepared to do that for a year. We couldn't do it for more than one."

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