Nancy Drew showrunners tease 'very satisfying emotional and romantic' season 3

Nancy Drew (Kennedy McMann) is going to have to solve the case of who will steal her own heart because the Nancy Drew showrunners promise that season 3 will be "emotional and romantic" for the teen sleuth.

When talking with EW ahead of Friday's season 3 premiere, Melinda Hsu Taylor and Noga Landau reveal that while Nancy is going to have her hands full hunting a serial killer and dealing with an evil ancestor coming to town, she's also going to find herself busy getting involved in a love triangle.

"I'm most excited this season about telling what looks like sort of a traditional small-town serial killer story, but it actually, in true Nancy Drew fashion, becomes about something so much [different]. It's not what it seems to be," Landau says. "We start the season thinking this is just going to be a grounded true-crime serial killer kind of story and it turns into something so much more emotional and big and epic. And it's going to have ripple effects on Nancy's life and Nancy as a character moving forward in subsequent seasons in ways that we're super excited about."

"We actually are just working on the season finale right now," adds Hsu Taylor. "It's a very, very satisfying emotional and romantic run, especially for Nancy. All the characters get to have some pretty deep explorations of unfinished business, and we're going deeper into things that we could have just left behind in season 2 or season 1 even, but going back to see what are the repercussions of that incident or that sequence of events in somebody's life."

Below, check out what else the showrunners revealed about what fans can expect from season 3. Plus watch an exclusive sneak peek from the premiere — featuring Penn & Teller! — above now.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was the main goal you wanted to achieve with this season's overall arc?

MELINDA HSU TAYLOR: Last season, because we had really tackled mental illness, we started to think about: What do you do as you become a grown-up? I think a lot of that was influenced by the experience that folks had in the pandemic of sometimes things don't work out the way you wanted them to, and there's not really a do-over. You just have to kind of live with, "I was one of the kids who had a Zoom bar mitzvah," or, "My wedding was on Zoom," you know? Life breaks your heart sometimes. In the premiere, it was really important to us that Nancy [struggles with whether or not she gets into] Columbia. Also, there's romances and a great new villain and a great new love interest and so many things.

The season 2 finale ended on a massive cliffhanger with Temperance coming back to Horseshoe Bay, so what can we expect to see from her this season? Is she the main big bad?

HSU TAYLOR: She is, yeah.

NOGA LANDAU: But also, she and Nancy are going to go on a really complicated journey with each other. So there's going to be moments when we think maybe she's not quite so bad. She turns out to be a pretty intricate character that Nancy never quite gets a handle on.

Is this the kind of villain story where we'll end up starting to empathize with her?

HSU TAYLOR: [Laughs] To an extent.

LANDAU: We're going to learn her backstory. And we're going to start to understand why she's doing what she's doing and why it is that Nancy is going to start to sympathize with her at a certain point in the season. We're also going to look at that journey and realize how different she and Nancy ultimately are from each other.

HSU TAYLOR: As much as we will learn the layers and agendas beneath all of her, you know, everything's a long game with Temperance, she's also a villain. She really is a person who is like, "I told you I was a villain," which I think is really fun. I really delight in people who are unashamedly villainous or they just want what they want and they don't apologize for it. [Pauses] In fiction!

LANDAU: She's a different kind of villain than we've had on the show before too, because we've done a lot of, like, Everett Hudson types, and she's the first woman who's really been a big, big bad for us. I mean, the Aglaeca was a big bad for a while but then she turned out to have a bit of a journey.

Where does season 3 begin?

HSU TAYLOR: It's a week later, and those knocks on the door, pay attention because they will come back. They are significant for a really important reason — can't tell you why, but there is something being set up for later episodes with the knocking on the door. In the interim, George asked Nick to marry her and he's been quiet for a week which is making her insane. [Laughs] Bess is slowly putting a toe in the water and researching more about the Women in White and her Marvin heritage. Ace is still pretty happy with Amanda, but he's also, in the way that when somebody is toxic like Amanda's dad Mr. Bobbsey, who we met briefly in 216, they're toxic all the time. And in an effort to be helpful to Amanda, we'll find that Ace, thinking like, "I can handle it, I am a big boy, and I know what people can do sometimes if they've got their own underlying things that they want, but I can handle it," and it turns out maybe he can't handle it quite as much as he thought he can. Getting involved with Mr. Bobbsey's seemingly innocent favors at the beginning of the season is going to lead to a bunch of places in Ace's storyline.

In the premiere, we see Nancy begin to struggle with either going to college out of town or staying in Horseshoe Bay, so how does that set up her season 3 journey?

LANDAU: This is her season-long mission. She says in this episode, "I am going to stay here; I'm going to grow where I've been planted." And part of that really is about her starting to pick up the mantle of defending this town and being its protector. The real story of Nancy this season is that she realizes how complicated and how hard it is to stick to a mission like that. It's really hard to stick to your resolve in protecting a town, especially when, without spoiling too many things, Temperance also feels like this town belongs to her, in a sense. It really puts the two of them at odds; they each feel an ownership over this place for very different reasons.

I'm super excited to see Nancy and Ace's will-they-won't-they dynamic explored this season. What can you tell me about what we'll see from their relationship now that they've started to develop these feelings?

HSU TAYLOR: It's definitely a big question of the season. This is a big season if you're a "Nace" fan. It's also a big season if you want Nancy to find somebody who is able to go toe-to-toe with her in other ways and who is very attractive in different ways. Maybe I chatted with Kennedy in the cast tent and was like, "If you had to have a rival for Nancy's affections, what are the things that would draw Nancy to somebody else... who might be an FBI profiler?" [Laughs] That kind of thing. It's very specific to the female gaze and also specific to Kennedy somewhat but definitely specific to Nancy. We want it to be a real love triangle where it's like, "Ugh, I can totally see her with either of these guys." Not because one of them provides something that the other doesn't. It's just more like as a person, Nancy feels that she herself would choose this one for x, y, and z reasons and choose this one for the other reasons.

Now that George proposed to Nick, what are we going to see from their relationship moving past this big step?

LANDAU: They're super committed to each other at the beginning of the season because they know that George only has 10 years left to live, and they're going to try and jam as much of their life and their romance and their love story into those years that they have with each other. But there are going to be twists and turns along the way that they don't anticipate that are going to change that. And we're going to have to see if their love is going to survive even more turmoil and setbacks in the road that we didn't see coming. It's really the story of two people who are super young to be committing to each other for the rest of their lives, even if one of their lives is cut short, they're still like 19, 20. It's a lot of what does a really, really young marriage actually look like if you're going to go through with it?

HSU TAYLOR: And we'll see more about George's relationship with her sisters also. George's relationship to family is a big thing for her this season. And for Nick, he's going to be going fully into this youth center that he's opened. This youth center becomes a focus for a bunch of different stories. Bess is also going to have a love interest who persists through the season and she ends up intersecting with the orbit of the youth center also.

LANDAU: She's also going to be still mourning the memory of Odette because that was a really profound love affair for her. And it's possible we haven't seen exactly the last of Odette either.

HSU TAYLOR: Yeah, without contradicting anything we've said so far, Bess hasn't fully come to a closure with that relationship. So we're going to explore that.

Nancy Drew season 3 premieres Friday, Oct. 8 at 9 p.m. ET on the CW.

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