I’ve been in heaven with all the post-apocalyptic survival movies coming out in the last few years. It’s my favorite genre and series creator Adrian Hodges may have given me the greatest gift on television. Survivors is the BBC’s take on the aftermath of a global epidemic. Set in a now empty England, the survivors try to piece society back together. BBC America will air the series and that’s why I got my post-apocalyptic geek on with Hodges.
Adrian Hodges: It’s a question that I started with. It’s almost the first thing I thought about. If we had 22 episodes and three seasons or four seasons, you might approach storytelling a bit differently. But we’re not Lost. We don’t have that luxury of time. And also, having had the benefit of seeing Jericho and Lost and various other things in the last three or four years, I kind of felt that I didn’t want to go down that particular route. I do think Survivors asks a lot of questions but they’re sort of more human questions than questions about the form of the show. They’re not that kind of thing. So in terms of the continuing story, I wanted it all to work in an imaginative and unusual and hopefully surprising direction, but not in a way that would be about adding more and more mystery.
Q: Does that preclude a follow-up series?
Adrian Hodges: Oh, I very much hope there will be a series II. No, we don’t finish it. I’m not saying that we finish it. The questions that remain are intensely to do with human dilemmas. They’re to do with real character things as well but also other surprises about things.
Q: Where did this development fall in the post-apocalyptic boom? Was it even before I Am Legend?
Adrian Hodges: It was weird how it all happened. As I don’t doubt you know being in this area, this is based on a show that was made in Britain in the early ‘70s. So to that extent, we started just slightly before I Am Legend came out. I think I knew that they had done I Am Legend. At that point, I hadn’t seen it. You get a little upset because they’ve got $200 million bucks and they can empty New York and do all that stuff. I guess it was in the air. It was in the air like these things sometimes are. Of course, the thing is the swine flu thing hadn’t started then either so I guess it was just the timing was just [fortuitous]. It was out there. You don’t always know why something is out there. It just happens.
Q: And did you know The Road was getting turned into a movie?
Adrian Hodges: It’s interesting isn’t it because The Road is different again to these other ones we’ve said because The Road is such a deliberately realistic piece in the sense there’s almost no room for any kind of hope in it except if you believe that passing on the spark of the human spirit is enough hope. But I almost feel uneasy about watching the film because I can cope with it on the page but seeing it… I always assumed it was referring to a nuclear holocaust but I read an interview somewhere with Cormac McCarthy who said he was more thinking of an asteroid strike or something like that.
Q: Will we see how the virus affected other countries?
Adrian Hodges: Not at the moment, no. I think this little bit of England that we explore has to stand in for the rest of the world.
Q: Thanks for episode 2. It’s all about finding supplies, which is my favorite part of the genre.
Adrian Hodges: Thank you, I was thinking of you when I wrote it, Fred. What can I say?
Q: How much fun do you have with the idea of what’s left in the world?
Adrian Hodges: It’s a lot of fun. It’s interesting, because you talk to different survivalists, different types of people and actually surprising how different people’s answers are. So in the end, you just come up with a kind of your best guess.
Q: Is Abby the first mom action hero?
Adrian Hodges: You’re making a good point about Abby because it is all about someone who is completely ordinary finding something extraordinary about themselves which is the fun thing. She is a housewife action hero because if life had carried on normally, she never would have had to do any of those things. A lot of people would crumble and fall, where she doesn’t. She just keeps going and she will do anything to make this situation better. That’s what’s great about it I think.
Q: What are your favorites in the post-apocalyptic survival genre?
Adrian Hodges: At the moment, my current favorite, I think it was a miniseries but I never saw the miniseries. The Stand I think is one of those books. I’ve only read it very recently. I deliberately hadn’t read it before I did Survivors and I’m glad I didn’t because there are two or three things which you find, you think, “Geez, that’s not dissimilar.” That’s a pretty great book I think. It goes off into strange areas.
Q: What is the appropriate level of sadness to show? Because everyone has lost all their loved ones, but if you go too sad it’s melodramatic.
Adrian Hodges: It’s a kind of interesting question because again it’s something I had to think about a lot when I wrote it because you have to show the levels of grief, because without that, you would be diminishing the impact of your drama. It’s about a realistic reaction to the situation but grief as a dramatic note to play can be repetitious very, very quickly so it’s a question of trying to find the balance and then move on.
