SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Episode 401 of Netflix‘s Sweet Magnolias.

After waiting a year and a half for new episodes of Sweet Magnolias, fans tuning in for the Season 4 premiere may be forgiven if they felt like they’d missed a season. The small-town drama about lifelong friends Maddie, Helen and Dana Sue and their family and romantic lives kicked off with a big, one-year time jump, recapping a slew of major developments that had happened off-screen.

Maddie and Cal are now engaged, and Maddie is a successful book author. Dana Sue’s restaurant Sullivan’s is now Sullivan & Friends, with her stepping back to run the Magnolia Community Foundation, with Erik taking over as chef and Cal as lead partner.

Despite those longing looks and spark-inducing hand touches in the Season 3 finale, Erik and Helen are revealed to be happy in relationships: Erik is still with Genevieve who had been MIA the last couple of episodes of last season, and Helen is with Alexander, an architect working on the Sullivan’s renovation. Also, Serenity’s intrepid newspaper reporter Peggy, whom Helen encouraged to run for office in the Season 3 finale, is now the town mayor, with her predecessor Trent in prison. Uncovering decades of corruption and neglect, she recruits Helen to help get Serenity back on track.

The surprises in the premiere didn’t stop, with Ty, who had been stuck in the friends zone with Annie for four seasons, suddenly finding the courage to profess his love, which is reciprocated. It happened during the Serenity Halloween party at the Townsend house, which served a jaw-dropping twist of its own when it became a surprise Maddie-Cal wedding.

In Part 1 of her interview with Deadline about Season 4 of Sweet Magnolias, showrunner Sheryl J. Anderson explains why she and her writers decided to kick off the season with a big time jump that pretty much resets the show, with the main characters in a very different place career-wise and relationship-wise.

“Which is exactly why we did it,” Anderson said. “There are 34 minutes between Season 1 and Season 2, and 2 hours and 34 minutes between Season 2 and Season 3. We thought it would be interesting to take a big jump and surprise and hopefully delight our viewers by showing, ‘Hey, stuff has happened in Serenity,’ and to be able to unfold what had occurred in the intervening year as it best suited our storytelling.”

Below, Anderson is addressing all the major events in the time jump and the surprise wedding. (If you have seen the rest of Season 4, check out Part 2 of the Deadline interview about the season’s shocking death and Part 3 about new romances and that game-changing finale cliffhanger.)

Maddie & Cal’s engagement

DEADLINE: We invested in Maddie’s relationship with Cal for the last four seasons. Why did you decide to take a major romantic moment like an engagement away from viewers and do it in off-screen?

ANDERSON: We didn’t feel that we were taking anything away from the viewers because they were pretty much toeing the starting line, they were almost engaged at the end of Season 3, and so we didn’t feel like we were taking anything away by acknowledging, yes they got engaged. And we wanted to surprise our viewers, just like we surprised everybody else in Serenity by having them get married.

Helen & Erik

DEADLINE: In the Season 3 finale, Helen and Erik seemed on the verge of getting back together. Instead, we found them both in relationships with other people. It almost felt like you artificially put in those characters to keep Helen and Erik apart. What was that about?

ANDERSON: Well, I’m very sorry that it struck you as artificial. We talked a lot in the room about the romantic experiences we’ve all had, that sometimes your feelings for an ex are so intense that you just can’t allow yourself to go there, because if you’re going to go back to that person, you want to make sure It works the next time.

And so Genevieve and Alexander are part of Erik and Helen’s journey back to each other. We make reference — well, we stole from Gershwin — “the bumpy road to love.” We thought that Helen and Erik, as deeply thoughtful, deeply emotional people who were both carrying a fair amount of trauma from previous relationships — which we watched Helen exorcise hers — that they didn’t want to rush back together for fear that it would not work. Because they still had their own things to work out — not that they were consciously taking advantage of their relationships with Genevieve and Alexander. They were just dating.

Brooke Elliott as Dana Sue Sullivan and Dion Johnstone as Erik WhitleyCourtesy of Netflix

Dana Sue & Sullivan’s New Ownership

DEADLINE: What was the rationale behind getting Dana Sue out of the kitchen? Also Cal, who has gone through several jobs already — baseball coach, construction worker, and silent partner at the restaurant — is now a hands-on partner. Why did you want to change that dynamic at the restaurant?

ANDERSON: Season 4 is about seizing your passion, whether it’s in relationship, in profession, in hobby, and we felt that Dana Sue was at a really interesting point. Obviously the Community Foundation is so important to her. When you’re the head chef of a restaurant, you have no time for anything else, and we felt that she had reached a point in her professional development where she wanted to take some time to pursue some other interests, and that she had the full support of her family and her friends to do that. It allowed Erik to step up, which he was ready to do, and it allowed Cal to literally invest in the community he has come to love.

Ty & Annie

DEADLINE: After pining after Annie for four seasons, why was this the moment when Ty all of a sudden decided to tell her how he felt?

ANDERSON: It hasn’t been all of a sudden, it’s been most of his life. He’s looking at leaving town, and this is why Olivia pushes him, if we’re going to leave town, do you really want to leave town without telling her? Because, as Olivia tells him in that first episode, if you don’t tell her, and we come back and she’s with somebody else, it’s on you. So it is the crack in the dam that opens his heart.

They had bad timing previously; she was with Jackson, he was with CeCe, so he has been holding back, but getting ready to go on the road with Olivia, he has to recognize the truth. Olivia is his friend, she’s not interested in him romantically. She’s just saying, “Don’t be an idiot, don’t miss your chance.” And he finally hears that.

Penny & Helen

DEADLINE: Penny is a new mayor who inherited a mess. Talk about having a woman — actually two women, because Helen is helping her — in charge and trying to tackle something that few seasoned politicians can while facing adversity.

ANDERSON: Frankly, a lot of women who achieve positions of power find themselves having to clean up after men, so we wanted to explore that. We also thought that Helen and Peggy coming together to turn Serenity around made a very clean delineation of what generations of Lewises as mayors had done to Serenity.

We also were very interested in watching them become close friends, sisters, Helen says by the end of the season. Because Helen was a magnolia and Peggy was Mary Vaughn’s best friend, they’d never been friends, but with Mary Vaughn gone and Trent in prison and Serenity needing a new leader and Helen willing to support her, we wanted to watch that friendship grow into sisterhood and the town to benefit along the way.

JoAnna Garcia Swisher as Maddie Townsend in episode 401 of ‘Sweet Magnolias’Courtesy of Netflix

Maddie & Cal’s nuptials

DEADLINE: After skipping the engagement, why did you also decide to forego wedding preparations on the show? Why a surprise wedding and why on Halloween?

ANDERSON: Well, Maddie talks about the fact that she and Cal sat down with the kids and wanted the kids to participate in the wedding. A lot of that came from the kids, but on a practical level, what better way to get people to a party in the fall and not divulge the real reason for the party than a Halloween party?

DEADLINE: There’s Christmas too.

ANDERSON: But they didn’t want to wait until Christmas.