Were you at all hesitant to kill Katie?
It never occurred to me for a minute not to kill Katie because her death was so powerful when I watched it in the Belgian series, and it really cemented my obsession with the show, that they’d be willing to do such a bold, powerful thing. For me, it was never in question. And it wasn’t until I read some responses after the fact where people felt betrayed and upset by that choice that I even thought, “I wonder if I should’ve thought about that for an extra five minutes.” One of the reasons why I love the virus genre, the quarantine genre, is because the stakes are so high, and you’re put into situations where you are going to have deep and intense emotional attachments or detachments to and from people, and everyone is at risk, and everyone can die. So to build a powerful love story that wouldn’t necessarily have ever happened in any other circumstance and then to break it in half as a result of the virus felt like you had to do something that big and bold in the show to make it matter. Plus I love to destroy love. [Laughs.] It’s this twisted little problem I have. I think, make it as beautiful as you can and then rip it away. That’s my sadistic thought as a storyteller. [Laughs.]
The final minute of this show included a voiceover, which was new. Why did you choose to end with that, with Jake, and with an I love you.
Well, the original script was written to end on the reveal that Lex had entered the cordon. That mirrored exactly the final shots of the Belgian version. In our minds, that’s how our show was going to end as well. And then that song was so beautiful that when we put it in, it felt like the episode peaked too early, and that everything that happened after the moment of scattering the ashes felt accidentally like an after-thought. When we really took a look at it, we realized that musically somehow, it was telling us that the story was ending a different way than the script said. So then we shifted the pieces around and decided to end it on that beat of hope and love. I have to say, of course we were hoping that we’d have an opportunity to continue the series for another season to finish the story, but in that getting taken away, I’m glad it ends the way it does in a weird way, because it feels like it is the most emotional period at the end of a sentence that we could’ve come up with.
It never occurred to me for a minute not to kill Katie because her death was so powerful when I watched it in the Belgian series, and it really cemented my obsession with the show, that they’d be willing to do such a bold, powerful thing. For me, it was never in question. And it wasn’t until I read some responses after the fact where people felt betrayed and upset by that choice that I even thought, “I wonder if I should’ve thought about that for an extra five minutes.” One of the reasons why I love the virus genre, the quarantine genre, is because the stakes are so high, and you’re put into situations where you are going to have deep and intense emotional attachments or detachments to and from people, and everyone is at risk, and everyone can die. So to build a powerful love story that wouldn’t necessarily have ever happened in any other circumstance and then to break it in half as a result of the virus felt like you had to do something that big and bold in the show to make it matter. Plus I love to destroy love. [Laughs.] It’s this twisted little problem I have. I think, make it as beautiful as you can and then rip it away. That’s my sadistic thought as a storyteller. [Laughs.]
The final minute of this show included a voiceover, which was new. Why did you choose to end with that, with Jake, and with an I love you.
Well, the original script was written to end on the reveal that Lex had entered the cordon. That mirrored exactly the final shots of the Belgian version. In our minds, that’s how our show was going to end as well. And then that song was so beautiful that when we put it in, it felt like the episode peaked too early, and that everything that happened after the moment of scattering the ashes felt accidentally like an after-thought. When we really took a look at it, we realized that musically somehow, it was telling us that the story was ending a different way than the script said. So then we shifted the pieces around and decided to end it on that beat of hope and love. I have to say, of course we were hoping that we’d have an opportunity to continue the series for another season to finish the story, but in that getting taken away, I’m glad it ends the way it does in a weird way, because it feels like it is the most emotional period at the end of a sentence that we could’ve come up with.
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TVLINE | Correct me if I’m wrong, but when the show was announced at upfronts, it wasn’t labeled a limited event series. That came much later.
Yeah. That came out of, I think, a desire to “eventize” the experience. They knew that since the show did have a satisfying ending that it was a risk they were willing to take, that it could work as a single [season] series if it needed to, or it could live on. Between the marketing point of view and wanting to get people excited and knowing that they weren’t misleading the audience — because if it did, in fact, end, it would feel like it had a proper ending — those were the choices that they decided to make.
TVLINE | Was there anything that you would have done differently if you had known it was going to be a one-season series?
Well, if I had known that from the beginning, I would have finished the story. I would have found a way to find a cure and see a sense of hope that the quarantine would be lifted. We got pretty close to that, coincidentally, so that’s good. But I would have liked to see it go on for another chapter in order to tell the other half of the story.
TVLINE | What was in store for a potential Season 2?
We had the conflict at the hospital. As the entire community is waiting for the virus to die out, knowing they won’t be free until it does, Dr. Cannerts comes up with a way to keep people alive, even though they’re symptomatic. So there’s a bunch of people, diseased and able to spread the virus, that he’s keeping alive and healthy but still infectious. Suddenly, these people who just 20 days ago were outraged to be placed in a cordon find themselves having to cordon off an area within their own zone so that they can potentially avoid infection from the people at the hospital. So we had a great cuckoo’s nest kind of division: the hospital filled with sick and dying people versus a community of people trying to build and hold on and survive in functional ways by deciding what to do about communication and law and martial law and how to feed themselves and how to teach their kids and how to be intimate with each other — all the things that you need to have when you’re stuck somewhere and you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
Yeah. That came out of, I think, a desire to “eventize” the experience. They knew that since the show did have a satisfying ending that it was a risk they were willing to take, that it could work as a single [season] series if it needed to, or it could live on. Between the marketing point of view and wanting to get people excited and knowing that they weren’t misleading the audience — because if it did, in fact, end, it would feel like it had a proper ending — those were the choices that they decided to make.
TVLINE | Was there anything that you would have done differently if you had known it was going to be a one-season series?
Well, if I had known that from the beginning, I would have finished the story. I would have found a way to find a cure and see a sense of hope that the quarantine would be lifted. We got pretty close to that, coincidentally, so that’s good. But I would have liked to see it go on for another chapter in order to tell the other half of the story.
TVLINE | What was in store for a potential Season 2?
We had the conflict at the hospital. As the entire community is waiting for the virus to die out, knowing they won’t be free until it does, Dr. Cannerts comes up with a way to keep people alive, even though they’re symptomatic. So there’s a bunch of people, diseased and able to spread the virus, that he’s keeping alive and healthy but still infectious. Suddenly, these people who just 20 days ago were outraged to be placed in a cordon find themselves having to cordon off an area within their own zone so that they can potentially avoid infection from the people at the hospital. So we had a great cuckoo’s nest kind of division: the hospital filled with sick and dying people versus a community of people trying to build and hold on and survive in functional ways by deciding what to do about communication and law and martial law and how to feed themselves and how to teach their kids and how to be intimate with each other — all the things that you need to have when you’re stuck somewhere and you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
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