Bruce Campbell is getting a little old to carry a TV show solely on his own back, tortured as it is by years of being treated like a Looney Tunes character by his friend Sam Raimi. So Starz has cast some other people for its upcoming Evil Dead TV show Ash Vs. Evil Dead, to act as the sidekicks in Ash Williams’ ongoing war against the titular first-person-perspective force. Ray Santiago (Meet The Fockers) will join the 10-episode show as Pablo Simon Bolivar, “a Sancho Panza to Ash’s Don Quixote,” while Dana DeLorenzo (Californication) will play Kelly Maxwell, “a moody wild child trying to outrun her past.” Together, they’ll battle the monstrous Deadites and give Campbell someone to roll his eyes at in that dreamy, world-weary way he has.
Given that almost everyone besides Ash meets a horrible fate—ranging from the merely gruesome to the legendarily unpleasant, in the case of his sister Cheryl—in the Evil Dead movies, there’s no real guarantee of how long Pablo and Kelly will last. It’s possible, though, that when Ash Vs. Evil Dead debuts later this year, the powers of well-written TV contracts will be able to keep them safe where boomsticks, bravado, and badly botched incantations could not.