On paper, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner seem like strange bedfellows to adapt a postapocalyptic video game for TV. “ really is a blend of our backgrounds,” Robertson-Dworet, a screenwriter whose credits include and , says of her partner, a writer-producer best known for comedies , and . “I come from action and genre, and Graham knows the TV and comedy sides.
So is dramatic, but it’s also funny and weird.” Fortunately for them, fellow executive producer Jonathan Nolan and Amazon Prime Video, is also a hit. Before receiving its 16 Emmy nominations, the series premiered as the streamer’s most successful launch to date and earned a swift renewal.
Taking a break from their writers room — on the eve of Robertson-Dworet’s due date with her second child, no less — the pair discuss the five-year journey to marry their voices and what comes next. We joke that neither of us can write this show. I’ll do a pass and it isn’t quite right.
Then Geneva does a pass and it’s almost there. There isn’t anything on this show that doesn’t have to bounce back and forth between us a few times. We talked a lot about the Venn diagram of it — it has to be something that Geneva’s excited to write, that I’m excited to write and, especially for the first three episodes, Jonathan has to be excited to direct.
The appeal is in the middle of those three seemingly unrelated circles. Jane Austen isn’t sacred anymore. There might’ve been a time when you were a Philistine if you deviated in an adaptation, but not anymore.
For , we did alter the course of the game’s canonical history. There was a Reddit thread that had to get shut down. ( ) People were so mad.
So it is sort of the new sacred cow in a way. That makes it kind of fun to play with. Because it’s an open world game, there are many ways the narrative can unfold.
It’s not as locked, sequentially, as — where they did a beautiful, very direct adaptation of the video game story. We didn’t have that option, because everyone who plays the game does it in a different order. That was wonderfully liberating, because we got to come up with our own story and our own characters within this world.
When we started this project, we asked ourselves, “What characters would we want to create in this world and mythology?” Regarding the dystopia part, we’re there, too. ( ) That was our priority going into this, because we’re going to work on this show for a very long time. It has to be fun.
Hopefully by being fun for us, it is fun to watch. Even though it’s an apocalypse show, we wanted to make sure that we focused on human behavior — which I don’t think can be obliterated by nuclear bombs. Our idiosyncrasies would survive.
We didn’t know all the episodes were going to drop at once, so we asked ourselves, “What’s the apocalypse show you want to come back to next week?” It can’t be a trudge through the wasteland. That would be miserable. That was why we ended up focusing on three characters, three points of view.
Graham had just rewatched and pitched it as, “What if we did our version of that?” I thought it was brilliant because is all about factionalism, how humanity is doomed to break into warring factions over and over again. It let us create three point-of-view characters, each from a different faction. We’re writing and we’re going as fast as we can while still hanging on to the quality.
The real tension of season two is you want to turn it out as quickly as possible without sacrificing anything in the process. It’s been a much easier task writing this season, because we have a show to look to. We were still figuring out the tone of the show, right down to the sound mix, during season one.
The work we did in season one is going to speed up season two. It’s been fun playing with a lot of the same ideas, while also expanding on them and addressing other issues in the world that we see through our show. Graham and I have loved these characters for five years, so we’re excited that audiences seem to have connected to them as well.
There are also going to be a lot of things from the mythology that we didn’t get to play with the first season. We only had eight hours! That was the painful part, cutting the things from the universe that we couldn’t do justice to in the first season. THR Newsletters Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day More from The Hollywood Reporter.
