One of the showrunners for Lucifer, Joe Henderson, explains how the DC comics influenced season 6. Lucifer was a TV series based on the character Lucifer Morningstar from Neil Gaiman's comic series, The Sandman. Season 1 premiered in 2016, and the series would come to a close with season 6's release in 2021. Lucifer's ultimately long run can be attributed to its dedicated fanbase, which allowed the series to push past shaky ratings and mixed reviews to become one of the biggest streaming shows of recent years.

Initially, Lucifer was ordered by Fox, but after 3 seasons with fairly low ratings, Fox opted to cancel the show. However, only one month later, Netflix would pick up Lucifer and give the show an additional three seasons; the show's ratings became consistently higher than they were during Lucifer's run on Fox. While the series was inspired by Gaiman's The Sandman, and by the spin-off comic series Lucifer also developed by Gaiman, the television series largely developed its own plot lines and characters. However, references to the Lucifer comics can still be found throughout the series.

Related: Lucifer Solved The Devil's God Problem (But Took Too Long To Do It)

In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, showrunner Joe Henderson explained how the Lucifer comics influenced the final season of the television series. Henderson says that he was largely inspired by Mike Carey's run of the comics (which went from 2000 to 2006), and that it was ultimately a matter of trying to figure out how to bring big ideas from the comic page to the screen. Read Henderson's full comment below:

"I was a huge fan of Mike Carey's run, I was obsessed, so yeah, we devoured that. I, in particular, was obsessed with everything he did. I think the challenge was that the comics are such an incredibly huge tapestry, what we would try to do is just, "Okay, here's this amazing idea, what is the version of it that lives in our grounded world?" There were bounties we had out on big ideas, like, "How do we bring them in?" The idea that Mom's world is filled with centaurs was a nod to the comics, all of that stuff. I tried to get Gaudium in, I chased it, I got his name referenced in a file cabinet at one point and I was like, "Good, that's gonna hold me to get him in there," and we just could never figure out how to do it justice. Because all these big crazy ideas are awesome in a comic or in a world that isn't our grounded world, but we always wanted to make sure if we were going to do them, we do them right. But, centaurs was, I'm really happy we got that in there. [Laughs]"

Lucifer Tom Ellis TV Trailer

With adapting a comic book to the screen being a tricky process, the Lucifer showrunners aren't the only ones to have struggled with bringing in big comic ideas. The Umbrella Academy showrunners have admitted to facing similar issues in season 3 of their show, saying that there are scenes in the original comics that they simply couldn't afford to do on television. Though Henderson was ultimately able to get a few centaurs into Lucifer season 6, it seems some comic book storylines were just too difficult to accurately translate to the TV show. This could be because of creative issues in bringing comic visuals to life or because of the aforementioned financial obstacles.

Whereas some television adaptations receive scathing reviews for deviating so much from their source material, it'll no doubt come as a relief to viewers that the Lucifer showrunners had every intention of bringing more of Gaiman's comic world into the series. It's better to have skipped out on certain comic plot lines than to have done them poorly or inaccurately, which is exactly what Henderson opted to do in the show's final season. Though the series has since come to an end, audiences can still enjoy the Lucifer comics without being spoiled for plot lines that ultimately weren't used in the show.