Welcome To Derry Focuses On Mike Hanlon

HBO’s “IT: Welcome to Derry” is a deep dive into the terrible historical legends surrounding Stephen King’s fictional town of Derry and its most famous and unwanted resident: the mysterious IT entity that wakes up every 27 years and preys on children. Season 1 takes the viewer to the 1960s, where terrifying and tragic events unfold, and a very familiar family tree stands at the center of it all. “Welcome to Derry” prominently features Leroy (Jovan Adepo) and Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige) and their son, Will (Blake Cameron James) — in other words, the grandparents and father of major “IT” character and Losers’ Club member Mike Hanlon. 

In the source material, Mike Hanlon establishes himself as a prominent It investigator whose interviews with Derry residents provide much of the town’s bloody backstory, as depicted on “Welcome to Derry.” As such, this is very much Mike’s story, and Andy Muschietti confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the character’s role as an IT historian drove the decision to focus on the Hanlons.

“Mike Hanlon is the bookkeeper. He’s the only Loser who stays in town,” said Muschietti. “He’s probably the guy with a stronger drive to get to the truth of things, and that means he’s a very prominent character in this world. We owed it to the Hanlons to tell their story.” With “Welcome to Derry” antagonist Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) looking to become one of the best TV villains out there, the Hanlon family’s story is set to become increasingly central. 

Stephen King’s “IT” unfolds across multiple eras, ultimately following an adult Losers’ Club confronting the creature years later. Since the book came out in 1986, Muschietti’s film duology tinkered with the timing of the story. As a result, the events depicted in Season 1 of “IT: Welcome to Derry” are set in the 1960s instead of the 1930s from the novel. 

This shift places the story in the middle of the civil rights movement, so it made all the more sense to make the Hanlons key characters on the show. “We needed to tell the story of the Black community that was going through these hardships,” Muschietti said in the Entertainment Weekly interview. “And in that way, also tell a part of the story of America in those years.” 

In the same interview, Taylour Paige noted that as a Black woman and a civil rights activist who’s married to a military man, Mike’s grandmother is the ideal person to recognize the way Pennywise elicits fear over a 1960s community. “Intuitively, something’s off,” she said. “It was in her gut all along. Even in her intimate life, she’s like, ‘My husband is committed to this role and duty for this country, but is this country committed to his freedom and our rights, also?’ What’s interesting about being someone in 1962, especially a woman, is you could have these feelings, and you would have to suppress that to be alive in the time.”