Interview with Ryan Condal, Co-Creator and Showrunner on #Colony
This interview originally ran just prior to the launch of the first season. The third season of Colony premieres on USA on Wednesday, May 2 at 10pm.
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In addition to the newsletter, we run an exclusive Q&A series with authors, editors, writers, creators and technical experts who are contributing to the genre. This time out we connected with Ryan Condal, co-creator and Showrunner for COLONY, the new show premiering on USA this Thursday night.
While COLONY certainly has fantastical elements, it’s also very grounded. How important is it for you to make sure the viewers feel like the show is anchored in what feels like a reality they recognize?
Very important. I think the science fiction that finds resonance with the audience does not exist in the ‘uncanny valley.’ That is to say, the closer the reflection is to what we know, the more the themes will strike home. We did not want to create an over-the-top dystopian L.A. We were fascinated with this 90%/10% rule. 90% of the world of COLONY looks just like ours. It’s the 10% that is off that makes the world unsettling.
How many, and what type, of consultants/experts does the show employ to make sure elements feel realistic Historians, political consultants, sociologists, people like that?
We had a tremendous researcher named Gregg Sutter who happened to have been Elmore Leonard’s researcher for over 30 years. Gregg is a Los Angeles resident and has an encyclopedic mind for history, science fiction, and analog audio equipment. We used him a lot to verify things, to make things feel right. Of course, beyond that there’s inventive fiction writing which is also needed in a good science-fiction show. This wasn’t a documentary (and we hope it remains that way, for our home’s sake).
In the 1930s, fictional heroes were characters like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers or Superman. Idealized, larger than life figures. Today it’s people like Colony’s Will Bowman (Josh Holloway) or The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Is this just a cyclical thing (a return of Hitchcock’s Everyman protagonists) or is it a larger social commentary about the times we live in right now? Or do today’s more sophisticated audiences just require a different type of hero than audiences of 80 years ago?
Just as this world wanted to be grounded, it wanted a grounded protagonist. I love myth-making. That’s why I wrote HERCULES. But COLONY was something different. COLONY was an exploration of the idea of colonialism and occupation through the eyes of the ‘everyman’ it affects. In this case, there’s an everyman and an everywoman in Will and Katie Bowman, the characters through which the audience will explore this show. If Will and Katie feel like people we know or could know — if we see a part of ourselves in them — we’ll empathize with their plight much more. Many of our audience members will have children. So when one of the Bowman children is missing, Will and Katie’s moral dilemma will be present for them because they can relate to the characters and their experiences.
COLONY was an exploration of the idea of colonialism and occupation through the eyes of the ‘everyman’ it affects.
USA certainly tapped into something with last year’s hit, MR. ROBOT [Ed note: Great show, highly recommended]. As a writer/creator of COLONY, what takeaways did you get from the success of that show?
Working with USA was extremely fortuitous for us because it helped pave the path for a new audience to find our show. We are grateful to have had MR. ROBOT lead the way for us. We hope audiences will see that COLONY fits with USA’s new direction, but it’s a different type of show than MR. ROBOT. We describe COLONY as an exciting espionage thriller-slash-family drama wrapped up in a science fiction mystery. With drones. And Sawyer.
We describe COLONY as an exciting espionage thriller-slash-family drama wrapped up in a science fiction mystery. With drones. And Sawyer.
Can you give us some insight into the writer’s room on COLONY? What are your inspirations, your source materials and what’s the process like to create a show which needs to drive a weekly story, but also has to create a new world and build a mythology around what happened (the wall)?
We had a small writers’ room for season one, since we were only writing 9 episodes (the pilot was already complete). We broke the season as a group and then individual episodes. Those would be assigned off to the individual writers, who would create an outline and a draft and then go off and write. Going into the room, I was very inspired by Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS, a tale about the ‘everyman’ French resistance against the Nazi occupation. Juan Jose Campanella, our pilot director and the director of episodes 2 and 3, grew up in the Argentinian dictatorship of the 1970s and had wild stories about living through what was essentially a police state. So we drew a lot of inspiration from that, as well as his favorite movie, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. We also drew from the real histories of the Nazi occupation of Europe, the English occupation of Northern Ireland and the formation of the I.R.A., as well as more contemporary history such as the U.S. occupation of Iraq and our situation in Afghanistan. As Carlton [Cuse, co-creator/co-executive producer] always says, virtually every country on Earth has been either colonized or has colonized other places. So everyone should see something familiar in our show.
A big thank you to Ryan Condal for taking the time to share insights into the creation of the show. You can watch the pilot episode online now, or see the premiere on USA on Thursday, January 14th at 10pm eastern.
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