![]() The show will “illuminate the horrors of the time, and highlight the parallels to now,” Green continues. This means, rather than Atticus (played by Jonathan Majors) hearing about someone’s experience with the sundown law, which allowed police to shoot Black people in their county after dark, he experiences it first-hand. “We are firmly rooted in the historical reality of 1950s America,” says “Lovecraft County” showrunner Misha Green. But as the epidemic of police discrimination and brutality against Black Americans has been pushed further to the fore in headlines and social discussions, showrunners are leaning into depicting it further on-screen. The novel was set in the 1950s, but published in 2016, which already allowed for the story of Jim Crow America to be told with the weight of decades of lingering effects and still-prevalent racism. ![]() “Lovecraft Country” is in a similar position to “Brave New World,” in that it mixes heavy history with science fiction. “We wanted to talk about what happens when people are neglected, when people aren’t heard, when people aren’t seen, and what happens when you keep telling people to look and feel and do a certain way - what their reaction becomes.” “It made the world feel like it still had something to say about today,” Wiener says. When Wiener created his version of the caste system of New London, it was designed to be a “multicultural utopia.” He rewrote important white, male characters such as world challenger Helmholtz Watson and world controller Mustafa Mond as women, and then cast women of color (Hannah John-Kamen and Nina Sosanya, respectively) to embody them. In this case, though, the biases do not have to do with race. It’s a ranking system, and we thought, ‘Well, shouldn’t different classes have different purposes? What that set up for us was an interesting way to investigate how these people who think they’re beyond bias, who don’t concern themselves with those differences the same way we do today, actually have biases too.” Wiener notes that the premise of “Brave New World” makes the only difference between characters “what you’re assigned when you’re born. “And so, taking on the challenge of examining what a white, progressive, liberal woman thinks of herself and thinks of her relationship to race, that’s how we tell a more nuanced story that I think, hopefully, can have people examine themselves.” “We didn’t want to examine this binary of ‘You’re racist or you’re not racist.’ We know what racist people look like, we think, but it’s not people at marches in KKK hoods only it’s also insidious, quieter, painful ways that it comes up in every moment of every day,” she says. “We all come into the world with biases and prejudices and shortcomings and gut reactions to situations based on so many things, but if you don’t examine those, how do you grow, how do you expand, how do you challenge?,” says “Little Fires Everywhere” showrunner Liz Tigelaar.įor her 1990s-set limited series adaptation of Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel, Tigelaar was exploring motherhood, race and class issues around the arrival of a Black single mother and her teenage daughter, as well as the adoption of a Chinese American baby by a white family in suburban Ohio. They created projects that illuminate previously underrepresented areas of historical discussion while also highlighting how far sensibilities have evolved from the last time these stories were told. The showrunnners behind series such as TNT’s “ The Alienist,” Hulu’s “ Little Fires Everywhere” and both HBO’s “ Lovecraft Country” and “ Perry Mason” also allowed their larger perspective on events of the past to alter period-specific tales of race and class issues. Wiener is hardly alone in wanting to mold source material for a modern audience by allowing hindsight to shape certain elements. “The book is challenging, it’s a little out of date, and there are some elements that aren’t as relevant anymore, so for us it was about, how do you take the crystals that feel really true of that book and pass them through the culture of our own time?” “He didn’t have the benefit of the 90 years of history that we have,” Wiener says.
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