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Tyler Young brings a complex character to life in ‘Eyewitness’

Without strong, well-drawn characters who feel real, like you know them and understand their emotions and loyalties and flaws, a drama just won’t work. Plot twists carried out by characters who feel fake, like their actions are dictated by someone’s script rather than by their own human decisions, just don’t quite land.

Fortunately, that is very much not the case in “Eyewitness,” a new drama premiering at 9 p.m. Sunday on USA Network that follows the aftermath of a triple homicide in a small New York town.

There are few one-note characters in its ensemble cast, which is instead populated with wonderfully complex figures: a dedicated small-town sheriff trying to juggle her suddenly-more-complicated job with her suddenly-more-complicated family; her loving, kind husband trying to support her and keep up with the changes; a pair of strong-willed sisters on opposite sides of the law, both trying to do right by the people they love.

As Chicago-area native Tyler Young put it, “There wasn’t any character that felt like it was just a cliché or it was there to just serve one singular purpose. Every character on the show gets an identity that has multiple layers, and every character’s dynamic, every character has a story.”

He would know: Young plays Philip Shea, the show’s lead teenage character, whose story might be the most layered of all. He’s a city boy in a small town, a son worried about and missing his drug-addicted mother, a foster kid trying to fit into a new family dynamic, a seemingly comfortably gay teen in an environment where he can’t be open about that. And, to top it all off, he’s now a witness to the series’ central terrible crime.

“He’s been through so much more honestly than I’ve probably been through in my entire life at this point,” Young said.

Young grew up in the Chicago area, attending Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire and DePaul University. Though he now lives in Los Angeles, he has lived in various parts of Lincoln Park as well as the River North/Gold Coast area.

At 25, he already has a variety of material on his resume: training at DePaul and The Second City, appearances on “Chicago Fire” and “Empire,” a stint as the lead character of “The Avatars,” a musical show for the European Disney Channel.

But Philip is just the kind of character he wants to play, and “Eyewitness” is just his kind of material. Pretending to be a teen on a G-rated show for a European market was a stretch for him, he said, and moving from that into his “Eyewitness” role was easy, as he said his goal has always been to do more drama.

“The character’s really different from me, but tapping into this sort of dark, brooding, crime-ridden, moody kind of show felt very natural to me, actually,” he said.

Because Philip isn’t based on any real person, Young said he was able to “mold and create his identity.”

Young said he had seen friends’ “journeys with self-acceptance and exploration of their sexual identity” and discussed those experiences with them, and their stories and others he read helped inform his understanding of Philip’s.

For the more unfamiliar experience of going through the foster system, he turned to research, reading articles and books and watching a documentary to take in different perspectives.

“I tried to get an understanding of what that experience is like, to go through the foster care system, to sort of have to struggle to find your identity, not only your sexual identity, but also your general identity in the world, who you feel that you are, who you feel that you can become given your circumstances in life,” he said.

A key storyline in “Eyewitness” is Philip’s secret relationship with his popular classmate Lukas, who is far from openly gay. The two teens are together in a secluded cabin when the series’ central crime occurs, and they don’t come forward as witnesses because doing so would reveal their relationship and therefore their sexuality.

The focus “Eyewitness” puts on their relationship is something Young identified as unique and interesting about the show, that it’s putting a love story between two teenage boys at the forefront of the action.

“It’s not a side plot, it’s not a gimmick, we’re not token characters in any way,” he said. “We are one of the main relationships that is focused on in the show. And I think we explore this relationship very deeply. … I’ve never seen a television show that explored a teenage relationship between two people of the same sex so deeply as we do on ‘Eyewitness,’ and I think people are gonna be surprised at how far our relationship goes, the areas that we touch upon.”

Young’s not sure if we’ll be seeing more of “Eyewitness” after this season—it’s an anthology series, like “American Horror Story” or “American Crime Story,” so this season’s storyline will have run its course, wrapping up fairly neatly at the end. But a lot of the anthology series out there today use repeat ensemble casts—again, see “American Horror Story”—and Young said that the cast for this first season had great chemistry and “truly love[s] each other.”

“If the idea was presented, I wouldn’t doubt that people would be interested in getting the gang back together and telling another story, another eyewitness account, so we’ll see,” he said.

As “Eyewitness” prepares to make its debut, Young’s still waiting to choose his next project, and hoping for something that he and his fellow cast and crew are as passionate about as they were about this series.

He didn’t want to identify a specific type of project for his future-job wish list—”something on paper can be one thing, and then in execution it’s completely different,” and it all comes down to the people involved and their energies, he explained.

But he’s interested in doing a dark comedy, or a dramedy, “although I think all drama has some, all good drama, at least, should have some humor to it and some pathos. It’s a mix of those.” Or something like “Transparent,” he said, “where it’s sort of a fusion of comedy and drama and everything in between.”

Something, it sounds like, with plenty of layers.

@gauxmargaux | mhenquinet@redeyechicago.com