Carnival Row creator Travis Beacham never thought he’d ever see his story on-screen. The Amazon Studios fantasy-drama began as a spec screenplay he began writing in college, he told The Verge. “And it was really just for an audience of one. I thought everything I was putting in it was insanely cool, but I never imagined that it would resonate with anyone else. I think that’s really the history of this project, is just being constantly surprised by the fact that I’m not the only person who likes this sort of thing.” 

After years of development, Beacham’s original Blacklist-winning film script (originally titled A Killing on Carnival Row) has become a series, with an initial eight-episode season already available on Amazon and a renewal for season 2. The tale, set in the Burge — a city reminiscent of Victorian London — focuses on the humans and fae whose uneasy coexistence leads to violence, political intrigue, and romance. 

At the center of the story are police detective Philo (Orlando Bloom) and rebellious faerie Vignette (Cara Delevingne). Their star-crossed love is one of many storylines highlighting a class and racial divide, which serve as a clear allegory for modern social dynamics. Carnival Row brings in many elements to create something original, but as Beacham and executive producer Marc Guggenheim explain, they were careful to ground the narrative as much as possible — even relying on cop drama clichés from time to time, to make sure audiences felt comfortable with their new world. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision. 

What’s the origin of Carnival Row as a title?

Travis Beacham: The easiest way to talk about it would be in relation to the neighborhood itself. Just in writing, [the show] has gone through a lot of different names. I can’t really remember how we landed on Carnival Row, but what I landed on was the idea that, at one time, this neighborhood was the epicenter of human fascination with these other folks from across the ocean, and there were actual literal fairs and carnivals. I just liked the mashup for those ideas.

That speaks to how much development this project has gone through. 

TB: I have a really difficult time actually separating out the in-world history from the actual history of this idea. It’s all starting to meld together in my mind. 

In terms of developing the show, did you have any firm rules about the technological or fantastical elements?

TB: As far as technology goes, we try to lean on what was possible in Victorian times. They don’t have telephones or that sort of thing, but maybe they can have elevators. And if it falls into that historical window, we consider it fair game. I mean, it is an invented world. So we allow ourselves some room to budge one way or the other, but if it wasn’t something that was possible in actual Victorian times, that’s not something we’re going to do in our show. 

As far as the magic goes, one of the things that I like about fantasy stories is a sense of restraint, so that it’s not littered with magic. For instance, our faerie characters fly because they have wings. We try to root it in a physicality. So when you have magic, it feels kind of rare, and it feels like an intrusion on the physical world, rather than something that’s commonplace.

Marc Guggenheim: I would even say that, to the extent the show delves into magic, it’s more along the lines of mysticism than magic in the way we’ve typically seen. Again, that’s what it helps keep it grounded and interesting. When it does show up in the show, it’s a special event.

TB: In a normal fantasy show, where you’re waving wands around a lot, magic usually becomes relatively routine and commonplace. But in our show, it still has this weirdness. 

MG: Even just a character reading entrails is drawn from actual history. 

TB: The name for that character [played by Alice Krige] is the Haruspex, which is actually a Latin term. It means it’s someone who reads the entrails of birds. 

MG: It’s a niche job.

TB: Very niche.

The fact that this is an original world, not based on a book or movie, is such a rarity these days.

TB: Oh, yeah. It’s very unusual. So I think it’s always helpful to lean into narrative pressure points — anchor points of reality. You have the scene with Philo’s boss saying “give me your badge.” It’s in that kind of cliché where the audience gets the reassurance of, “Yes, there are a lot of weird things happening in this world, but I can follow this story. It’s going to lean into certain archetypes.” I think including that sort of familiarity helps with the newness of it. 

It’s like the fairy tale creatures. Everybody has in the back of their mind the idea of fauns as lecherous forest creatures or fairies as deceitful shape-shifters. So what we’ve done in this world is make all those archetypal fairy tale ideas become the racist stereotypes humans have. So we’re not fighting the audience. We’re leaning into all the stories they’ve heard. We’ve just recontextualized them.

This is a big factor in the context of the Agreus and Imogen storyline. [Tamzin Merchant plays Imogen Spurnrose, an upper-class young woman who becomes fascinated by Agreus (David Gyasi), a wealthy faun attempting to integrate himself into Burge high society.] In approaching that particular narrative, were you thinking, “What if Jane Austen was in our writers’ room?”

TB: [Laughs] It would have been great to get Jane, but she was unavailable for various reasons. But one of the things we love about the show is that it takes you to all these different places. It’s several different shows, and one of those is this Victorian romance. It was never really part of the original feature script I wrote, which was very focused on Philo and Vignette. But in expanding the story, we had to think about the whole world, and what other characters we’d meet. That was probably the most fun new thing to add because that was one corner of the world I never got to explore in the feature version.

In terms of the casting, how race-blind was your approach? 

TB: Obviously, we want a really diverse cast, so we tried to be blind about it. But in the case of Agreus, given the grounded nature of his dilemma — a minority who’s moved into an upper-class neighborhood — we didn’t want to put that problem in a white guy’s mouth, to put it bluntly. We definitely wanted to be diverse with that role.

MG: David [Gyasi] is amazing. He completely transforms. 

TB: I did a pilot at Fox ages ago, and he actually came about within a breath of playing the lead in it. I was extremely impressed with him. And his audition was amazing. I was texting everybody, “Oh my god, David Gyasi read. You gotta watch it.” I’m gratified I got to work with him. 

What kind of feedback did he offer on those sequences?

TB: He’s a really thoughtful actor about the historical context, as well as the context within the story. So he’s enormously helpful, going into scenes, just giving us feedback, and his perspective that he brings based on his own life experiences. 

On a technical level, are the fauns are the toughest creature makeup for the actors?

MG: Yeah, the makeup effects on the show done by a genius named Nick Dudman. He’s a legend in this field. He worked on the Harry Potter movies, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. And he designed Jack Nicholson’s prosthetic for the Joker in Batman. So he is literally the perfect person to do this show, and he’s constantly inventive.

In season 2, we’re going to literally double the number of fantasy creatures we see on the show. And Nick has not only created these creatures, but also gone back to figure out better ways to do the fairy wings and the application of the puck horns. He’s constantly coming up with new and different ideas, both in terms of the creative, but also in terms of delivery. 

TB: Nick is our Q. He’s an incredible engineer, as well as an artist. He’s scaling all this for television because TV moves at a certain pace. It’s very different from movies, and Nick is very cognizant of that. 

What are your new fantasy creatures like? 

TB: We’re looking at different varieties of pucks and fairies — different horn shapes and different wing shapes, races within races. But beyond that, you’re going to get some creatures that are our version of elves, and some creatures that would be goblin-like, and a host of other things. The menagerie of the world is really going to expand in season 2, quite a lot.

How is season 2 progressing?

MG: Great. We have a very extensive pre-prep period, and we’re just about done with all eight scripts for the second season, and we don’t even start production until the end of September. So we’re very, very far ahead of the curve, which is, quite frankly, where we like to be, and how you need to do a show of this size. 

You’re sticking with eight episodes for season 2 as well?

MG: Yeah, we liked it. We structured season 1 as an eight-chapter novel because we noticed that some short-order shows are structured like a movie where it’s a three-act structure. Travis and I found the middle of the season tends to lag a little bit on those shows. With our approach, in the middle is when everything really ramps up and changes. So it’s allowed for us to tell a story where every episode is impactful, and every episode is chockfull of big moments and character reveals. 

Because of the fantasy elements and the amount of worldbuilding involved, it seems that this is a show designed for an online fandom. Did you have that element in mind?

TB: We’re dimly aware, at the periphery, that the buzz and the enthusiasm is starting to grow.

MG: I’ve had some experience with fandom, and I think when the tone of the discourse is positive, it’s a wonderful thing. Because it really makes television fun and interactive. We’re writing so far ahead of when we are dropping the episodes that there’s simply no way to react to what the fans are liking or not liking. But as we start to roll out the show, it definitely started to dawn on us that this is the kind of show that that’s designed for people who go to Comic-Con. And the response there was terrific.

[Warning: Spoilers follow for the season 1 finale of Carnival Row.]

The season ends on a dark note, with the fae confined to a ghetto after the city undergoes major political upheaval. When you decided to end that way, what kind of storytelling did you hope that would enable for season 2?

TB: At the end of season 1, all of our characters are in completely different circumstances than they started the show. And that also includes the Burge itself. The change the city goes through in the eighth and final episode is so seismic that it really sets off season 2. It would not be possible to tell the story that we’re telling in season 2 without that change.

Will it be a more political season?

MG: The political angle is going to be explored a different way. The one thing we’re looking at is never exactly duplicating what’s happening in the real world — not doing an Animal Farm kind of analogue where it’s one-to-one this-to-that, but creating a situation that seems to be speaking to the real world. One of the most challenging things about concocting the political trajectory for season 2 is we don’t just want to do, “Oh, who’s our Donald Trump?” Instead, we want to tackle the issues that are currently in the real world, but in our own way, in a way that’s true to the characters we’ve set up.

TB: We might have a questionable political leader who is vastly unqualified for the job he holds. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

Just because there are puppets involved doesn’t mean The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is for little kids. “It’s not like they call it The Light Crystal,” executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach joked with The Verge on the eve of the premiere of the Netflix series, which serves as a prequel to the cult-favorite 1982 fantasy drama. 

Grillo-Marxuach worked alongside fellow executive producers Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews to resurrect the world of Thra. They used a mixture of recent technology and old-school craftsmanship to portray the Gelfling clans living under the rule of the evil Skeksis. While aiming for a young adult audience, the story features real stakes, dark twists, and intense action. Louis Leterrier, who helmed The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk, directed every episode.

Addiss, Matthews, and Grillo-Marxuach sat down with The Verge to discuss the making of the series, which features a remarkable voice cast — including Taron Egerton, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jason Isaacs, Mark Hamill, Eddie Izzard, Keegan-Michael Key, Awkwafina, Simon Pegg, Alicia Vikander, Andy Samberg, and Helena Bonham Carter — as well as some truly state-of-the-art puppetry. How the technology came to aid the storytelling, and vice versa, is almost as fascinating as the story being told.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

How did you get involved with this project? 

Jeffrey Addiss: Well, it’s the marriage of luck and hard work. So [Will Matthews and I] were thinking we’d really like to do a sequel to Labyrinth. And we thought, “Well, what are we going to lose?” So we told our agents to call up the Henson Company. They didn’t want to work on Labyrinth 2, but they said, “We’re working on a Dark Crystal thing. Do you want to do that?” So we stayed up all night and came up with a great pitch for a sequel feature. We go in to meet Lisa Henson in her office, and she says, “I’m so glad you’re here to tell us about your idea for our prequel TV show.” And we were like, “Yep, no problem! We can do it!” 

When we got the green light, that was when Javi came in, because we had never been in a writers’ room, much less run one. It was a very collaborative experience. 

Javier Grillo-Marxuach: We say working on a Jim Henson product is a team sport. With this one more than anything else, the theme of the entire show is unity. The Jim Henson ethos is very collaborative. It involves a lot of different artists in all disciplines, including writing. 

Everything about this project was really informed by this idea that we were all collaborators working on something bigger than all of us. The trope that was circulated was that this was a garden that had been tended for 37 years, and we were coming in to take care of it for a little while. We could decide where to put plants, but it was part of our job to keep the legacy intact and do new honor to that legacy.

JA: Don’t mess up the garden because, hopefully, we get to pass it on to somebody else. We had all the space we wanted — there was never a mandate of “You can’t.” We created whole characters, leads, and arcs. We were given a lot of space. 

JGM: To give you a concrete example, we went in and we looked at the head sculpt for the Scientist puppet, and they sculpted him with two eyes. We were like, “Well, in the movie, he’s got a mechanical eye.” And they were like, “We know, but we have to sculpt them in full, and then we will take out the eye and put in the mechanical eye because that’s a separate prop.” And then we said, “Well, we need to tell a story about the Chamberlain’s duplicity and his ability to maneuver events in his favor. Let’s have the Scientist with two eyes at the beginning, and show how he only got one eye.” And then that helped us with our storytelling. 

There was a point when this was being developed as an animated series. Why did that change?

JA: Netflix was developing an animated prequel series. And we came on only after Netflix called up Lisa and said, “Let’s do it with puppets.” She was like, “Are you sure? Do you know how hard that is?” It’s a testament to Netflix that they took this crazy leap of faith and did the show properly. It should be done with puppets. It should be live-action. It should feel tangible. It’s a built, created world. 

Will Matthews: It was just luck that when we called up, they were at a new beginning, and we’re like, “Okay, great. Here’s how you do that.” And it all came together.

JA: I think that the animated show was skewing a little younger, a little more magical. We were a little bit more grounded in this world. We felt like this was a much more tangible, dirty world. We spent a lot of time literally dirtying up the puppets.

JGM: We looked at this as a 10-hour drama. We never looked at it as “a puppet show.” We came into this with the intention of making Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, something that could compete with those properties. And the thing that informed everything we did was that we needed to have characters with rich inner lives and a world with real stakes. 

The voice cast recorded their lines after production. Were there cases where on set, the line would go one way, and then in post, you’d try something different? 

JA: Yes, and there were times because production was so fast that I would literally just [have the puppeteers mouth] about eight to 10 syllables, and then I could go back later and write the line. I did that very rarely, but sometimes it did happen, and we could create those moments in post as well. 

Did that lead to the cast improvising?

JA: We had Eddie Izzard. It’s one of his great skills. It’s tricky because we have so many rules in terms of words. Like, we try not to assign genders to the Skeksis. It’s very controlled and scripted. But within that, if the performer has an idea, and we can make it match to the mouth-flaps, we’ll come up with a new line. 

WM: Eddie Izzard got “bugger” in. 

JA: It was really funny, and it made us laugh, so there we go. Everybody’s building off of each other. And the voice actors got very protective of their puppeteers. Like Taron [Egerton] would be like, “No, no, Neil [Sterenberg] is mine.” They form a connection. It’s a synthesis. All of the puppeteers have voices in the show as well, so they’re all over the place. 

On your largest group scenes, how many people would be on set?

JA: On average, I think we were like 200 people because we also had our shops in the warehouse as well. We took over a warehouse space with 89 sets, which was about the size of two football fields. We also had a creature shop in there. So there are a lot of people, even separate from the design and art department, a lot of people in the building separate from what’s on set, if that makes sense. And then our largest days, I think we had 100 puppeteers on set, which is crazy. Some of them are doing radio control or second unit, things like that. Sometimes we had puppeteers just holding two puppets in the air as background because, like, “We need bodies on-screen.” I think if you’d ever picked up a puppet and lived in England, at some point, you wound up working on The Dark Crystal. It was big. 

WM: An amazing thing about puppeteers that I don’t think everyone understands is that they can play the lead on a character, a big part on a lead character, and then in the next shot, they’re someone else’s left hand. They really are a troupe. There’s a lack of ego. They move from one character to the other. It’s really encouraging about humanity. 

JA: It really feels like the idea of an old-school theater troupe, where one moment, you’re the lead, and the next moment, you’re handing somebody a cup. That’s how they treat it. It’s really cool.

How many puppeteers does it take to operate one Gelfing?

JA: Usually three. You’ve got the main puppeteer who’s doing the mouth and one arm, then they’ve got an assist doing the other arm, and then there’s somebody doing radio control of the eye blinks, and things like that. Unless you’re Alice [Dinnean], who did Brea. Alice had a separate performance system where she was controlling a lot of that herself, with a literal Wii nunchuck they converted. So she would often only have herself and an assist because she was in control of a lot of those facial movements. 

WM: It’s one of the reasons Brea is so good at eyerolls. 

JA: Yeah, because that’s Alice, doing every part of that performance along with her assist doing the other hand, all simultaneously.

JGM: One of the most fun things about doing this job was every Friday, we had a meeting at the creature shop. And we were watching the people there innovate new ways of doing puppetry. So for example, one day we got there, and the 3D printers were just chugging away. Obviously, 3D printing has been a boon to this kind of storytelling. But they were building a system that was custom-designed to the puppeteers’ hands, with individual controllers per finger, so the puppeteer would have complete fidelity from his or her hand movements to the hand at the end of the rod. 

I was also there the day they first tested the AI system with the Wii nunchuck controller. We got to see, in real time, how they were taking this art of puppetry that they’ve done for so long, and in meeting the challenges of the show, creating new technologies to do the things the creature shop has been doing for 50 years. One of the most interesting things was seeing how much 3D printing figures into it now and how much that helps build custom pieces for puppets, custom pieces for everything. That process has been game-changing.

WM: I remember one day at the shop, one of the designers very gently handed me the Emperor’s scepter. He said, “Be careful. This is the original from the film.” And then he accidentally drops it, and I started screaming. And then he was like, “Oh no, I just 3D-printed it. It’s just a perfect match.” [Laughs.]

JGM: Even though the Jim Henson Company is not exactly lax about archiving — they are the caretakers of the legacy of one of the most venerated creators in popular culture — there are certain things where they had to make guesses. One day, I went to the creature shop, and there was a guy airbrushing Aughra’s skin. He had a magazine that was printed in 1982 when the movie came out, he had stills from the movie, and some of the books that came out when the movie came out. Because nobody could quite figure out what Aughra’s actual color was. She looks different in different shots because of how she’s lit, the way any actor would look different. So sometimes you’re seeing an exact duplicate of what was on-screen 37 years ago, and some things on-screen are educated guesses. 

When it came to crafting the action sequences, did you feel limited by knowing you’d have to execute them with puppets? 

JA: It wasn’t about limitations. It was about collaboration. Louis had a pretty good idea of how he was going to shoot it. 

WM: It was very impressive storyboarding. I remember a lot of versions of storyboards.

JA: But there’s nothing that I would say that we ever pitched, that anybody ever said, “We can’t do that with puppets, it’s too far.” Which is crazy. 

WM: I mean, everyone’s trying to push the envelope all the time. And so everyone is the best at what they do. And everyone is trying to find a solution. So it was really very free.

JGM: An action sequence is no different from a musical number. In a stage musical, it’s what happens when dialogue no longer serves a dramatic purpose. So you always have a true north, whenever you’re staging this kind of stuff, in what is telling the story, what is driving home the emotional stakes. So there are a bunch of sequences where maybe you’re not seeing what we came up with in the room — not because the puppets couldn’t do it, but because there wasn’t enough time or money or what have you. But everything that’s in the show is there to serve the emotional reality of the world and the characters. And whether you’re doing drama or puppets, action sequences are hard to choreograph, technologically difficult. But you always have your true north of what in it is serving the character and the story. 

You can do nearly anything with CGI these days if you have enough time and money, but this feels so much more real. 

JGM: We treated the puppets the way you would actors in a movie. There’s a big talking point in Dark Crystal coverage about, “Oh, they didn’t use CGI?” Well of course we did. We’re building a world. It’s a huge VFX project. But the puppets are the main event, the puppets are the actors.

The biggest lesson I think we can all learn from CGI in filmmaking is that we need to be selective about what we choose to show on-screen. Because ultimately, one of the drawbacks of being able to do anything and everything is that you get too much. You don’t get enough of the gaps in the storytelling that engage your mind in it. There’s a reason Star Wars won the Oscar for Best Editing. It’s because their technology was limited enough that they had to make very strong choices about how the film being put together served that story. And with us doing this, even though we have access to all of this puppetry, even though we have access to CGI technology as well, we needed to look at all this and figure out, when the rubber meets the road, how do we make scenes so they’re only serving story?

JA: That’s a very high-minded answer. I’ll tell you, one of the most fun things is throwing puppets off of things. We just had the best time. So if you watch the show, if you notice in the back half, puppets start getting chucked around more because we just liked it. Just throwing those things was the best. 

JGM: They did so much puppet-throwing that it’s going to be an Olympic event.

JA: We got really good at it. 

JGM: A lot of people are going to see this and assume we did a bunch of things with CGI. And the truth of the matter is that a lot of the time, we didn’t. You are looking at really old-fashioned technologies that are working in concert with CGI. I mean, so much of this of this product is handmade. I think it’ll be interesting to find out what people thought was what and how frequently they’re right or wrong.

It’s been said that if Jim Henson had this technology, he would have used it just as much. 

JGM: Jim Henson wasn’t exactly a Luddite. If you look at, for example, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, they spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to make Kermit ride a bicycle in the prologue, and then that technology got applied to all of the movies that came afterward. Puppetry isn’t a static art. It’s an art that depends on technology. The technology keeps feeding the craft.

WM: That said, there’s nothing better than a couple of Podlings yelling at each other.

JA: Because they are the most puppety. There’s variations of like how puppety you can get with it. Yeah, the Gelflings are more “human.” They have a little bit more weight. But a Podling can run in, scream, fall down, jump up, be drunk, and run out the door, and you’re having a great time. A Gelfling doing that doesn’t feel right; a Skeksis doing that doesn’t feel right. So Podlings are really fun and freeing because they’re just physical comedy.

WM: You haven’t lived until you’ve had Lisa Henson say, “You shouldn’t put that in the script.” “Why not?” “It might be too puppety.” “I guess you’d know!”

Do you have a target audience in mind for this in terms of age? 

JA: I think Netflix does, and I think other people do. We just tried to write the story that felt right to us. We were thinking about younger audiences. We weren’t consciously trying to go to “dark places.” That is part of the show because it’s part of the legacy. There were times when we would have long talks about the violence, but it wasn’t from a perspective of trying to hit an age. It was trying to say, “What’s the point of the violence? What are the repercussions of the violence? And how is it part of this story?”

Do you have a plan in place for a second season? 

JA: Yeah, we have a written document that plans out season 2. Everybody’s very excited about it. And now we just wait to see what the numbers are and wait for that phone call that we get to go back to Thra. 

WM: If you watch it, we will write it. 

Production on season 1 presumably involved a lot of development, construction, and planning. Do you think season 2 would get going a lot faster? 

JA: I think it would be more efficient, but I would try to use the time to make the show even bigger and crazier. 

JGM: We know a little bit about what you can do with puppets and what the edge is. But we’re ready to move it to the next level after that.  

Plus, more puppet-throwing.

JGM: Olympic-level puppet-throwing. 

JA: Oh my god. It’s so fun to throw puppets.

Queer as Folk creator and former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies wanted to write Years and Years for, well, years and years. “Twenty years ago, I was talking about a drama like this,” he tells The Verge, “a drama that engaged with the modern world, that engaged what was happening, but in an ordinary domestic context so you felt the changes.”

But Davies didn’t officially move forward with his plans until 2016 when he was inspired by two seismic political moments: Donald Trump’s election and the Brexit vote. The family drama, which arrived on HBO on June 24th, begins in 2019, then leaps forward to reveal how relevant current issues like extremist politics, climate change, and new technological advancements combine to affect one British family.

That family, played by a robust ensemble cast, including Anne Reid, Jessica Hynes, Rory Kinnear, Russell Tovey, Ruth Madeley, T’Nia Miller, and Lydia West, is diverse in many ways, from race to sexual preference to gender identity to physical impairments. Davies says that was very much by design: “I’m a great believer in quotas. I think that’s how it works. I think if you don’t follow a quota, you do nothing.”

Davies’ characters, including Emma Thompson as rising politician Vivian Rook, are prone to making big speeches about the current state of the world, a narrative choice that Davies wrote into the show deliberately. “Some people watching it could discern that maybe it’s a bit grandstanding at times, that maybe people preach sometimes. But actually, that’s exactly what people are doing now,” he said. “Start me on the subject of Brexit, and I will give you a 25-minute monologue. So will anyone I know, which is a very different world. Twenty-five years ago, I don’t know anyone who could’ve done that about Northern Ireland.”

To some degree, Years and Years is another Davies polemic that is full of opinions about where the future is taking us. I talked to him recently about his commitment to diversity, how his own family’s use of technology affected his approach to the series, and whether the bleak future he predicts in Years and Years represents his own beliefs about what’s coming next.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you find a balance in the show between exploring technological changes and political changes?

My rule about going 15 years into the future in total is keeping it believable, so they’re not surrounded by holograms and things like that. We took a lot from that recent Netflix version of Lost in Space where there’s a futuristic drama. It’s obviously science fiction, but they all walk along with quite recognizable mobile phones. [The Lost in Space creators] made some very good decisions, in that your basic mobile phone can’t really be bettered.

We had early meetings to discuss, “Should we reinvent the mobile phone? Should we make it circular? Should we make it transparent? Should we pop it into people’s foreheads?” And in the end, you just sort of go, “That’s so distracting.” You want it to feel like the ordinary world with ordinary people in it. There are advances in technology that are talked about quite a lot, but in terms of design and the visual impact of stuff, we really tried to be quite sober with it.

The greatest flourish is that Snapchat filter mask that is worn in the first episode. But that’s not how the whole drama sustains itself. The thing is, technology is just slightly forward. Slightly advanced.

The whole family setting was inspired by things like WhatsApp groups because my family is now in a WhatsApp group. Most people’s families are in a WhatsApp group, I think. And that’s reinvented my family. It’s a good type of technology. In the past, a few years ago, if you’d ask me how often I spoke to my nieces — they’re all young women in their 20s — I would’ve texted them twice a year: “Happy Birthday” and “Happy Christmas.” That would have been it.

Now, we have this funny little thing in the family where we all send each other photos of our tea every single night. We text 10 or 20 times a day. I know everything they do. I know where they are now. I know what they’re up to tonight, who they’re going out with, who their friends are. Technology has revamped my family. So that’s at the heart of Years and Years.

Did you talk to futurists or people in tech?

No. To that effect, I relied on my own imagination. I did a lot of reading, and I did a lot of research myself. I wanted to get the balance right between a world that says there are cures for cancer coming your way — there is stem research that will alter your genetic code, there are solutions to all these problems — and yet, in your country, people can’t afford health care, and in my country, the waiting lists are three years long.

So I didn’t want to get carried away with the advances. I trusted myself to put a filter on the whole thing. To pull it back. You know, we all have opened up a newspaper that says, “A brand-new cure for cancer will be available in 10 years.” And that was 20 years ago. But these things take a long, long time to filter through into civilization.

A lot of what Years and Years showcases doesn’t seem like the future. It’s already arrived; it just isn’t necessarily accessible to the mainstream.

Yeah. The first episode whizzing five years into the future is kind of a metaphor. Everyone’s reaction has been very much, “Oh, that’s now. That’s today.” The device of going into the future is a dramatic device to say, “This is what life is like now,” much more clearly than a drama that’s set now.

All dramas, police dramas, medical dramas, they’re all set now, but it’s very hard for characters to walk into Grey’s Anatomy and discuss the fate of relationships with China. And the drama can’t bear that kind of strain because it’s not created for that. So you have to create a drama that allows that sort of device. Being in the future does that, but it’s very, very much discussing what we’re going to do now. And that’s why I’ve been keen and careful to never wander from that.

What was key in terms of creating your central family and figuring out what each character would bring to the narrative?

I wanted the generations. I wanted the diverse family. I mean, I think television — full-stop — should be diverse, no matter what I’ve been writing. If I’d been writing a comedy set in a Scottish nightclub, it still would be a cast as diverse as this one because I think you’re old if you’re not like that.

But also, within that classic family, it’s really interesting, I think, to take out the middle generation. You’ve got the grandmother and her four grandchildren, that was rather an interesting thing to do there. It kind of meant the grandmother and grandchildren were closer than they would be normally. Normally, there’s a bit of distance between three sets of generations. Remove the middle generation, and the family’s lacking something, which meant they felt closer, which meant they talk to each other more than perhaps a normal family does. And that’s nice. I like that effect. That was one of the fundamental tenets that I thought essential: how connected they are.

Was Ruth Madeley’s character Rosie always written as a wheelchair-user?

No, she wasn’t written as that at all. [Executive producer Nicola Shindler] had a word with me about how we do nothing to cast disabled people. Shame on us for being so able-bodied and ignorant. So we set out to cast someone disabled. It could have been anything. One of the characters could have been blind. One of the characters could have been deaf. But the moment we got introduced to Ruth Madeley, it all became very simple. It was like, “Wow. That is someone I want to work with immediately.” For the rest of my life. So obviously, she fit Rosie best, and that’s how that became.

Have many people brought up Black Mirror as a comparison point for this show?

Oh, quite a few, yes. That’s a lovely, huge, popular show, so if anyone wants to make that comparison, I am very glad to be in that company. It’s a great compliment, and I think Charlie Brooker’s an absolute genius. I love him. But [in Years and Years], there are only a couple of nods in that direction, with the technology. Charlie Brooker doesn’t own the future, bless him.

In this show, the future is so rooted in the family and their story. It adds an emotional component to each new change in society.

Yeah. It’s a look at the future, but you feel it. It could be sterile or it could be angry or it could be preachy or it could be cold, but this is how we all experience it. We’re all experiencing Trump. This is how we’re all experiencing Brexit, here. It’s via your family and your friends and the chats you have. This is the experience of history.

I haven’t invented that, you know. You look around for dramas that have moved forward year after year with a family at the heart of it — there’s Downton Abbey. [The British drama begins in 1912, eventually reaching the year 1925 by its end.] There’s the greatest drama ever made, Upstairs Downstairs. [The original 1970s series stretched from 1903-1930.] It’s actually quite the tried-and-trusted formula. I just spun it into the future.

Is Years and Years what you truly think the next 15 years will look like?

I have to hope it won’t be that bad. I always have hope. I think we’re a creative species. The climate worries me enormously. Never mind the politics. Never mind what our prime ministers or presidents say. Never mind what missiles are being fired. My goodness, what’s happening to the ozone and the ice caps? I think that horrifies me more than anything.

But I think we’re immensely clever, and once we reassess these issues, we might devote ourselves to finding our way out of it. There might be huge, vast changes. I think to write the drama that’s a hundred years in the future might be a huge act of the imagination, and maybe I’ll do that one day. But I think our lives will significantly change, what with the movement of populations and the weather. I think vast changes are coming.

Years and Years airs on Mondays at 9PM ET on HBO.

Fantasy author Neil Gaiman has been talking about managing the Amazon / BBC production of Good Omens for months now. Even so, he still gets emotional about Terry Pratchett, his co-author on the 1990 novel that the series adapts. “All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked,” Gaiman says. “That was the only rule.”

Gaiman is no stranger to working in television. Many of his comics and novels have been adapted for the screen, from the 1996 BBC miniseries Neverwhere to the Starz adaptation of his novel American Gods, which he produced. But Good Omens, which he scripted and produced, represented a new level of commitment for him. As the showrunner, he personally oversaw every step of production, per Pratchett’s dying wish that he make sure an adaptation was done right. Good Omens is Gaiman’s extremely faithful adaptation of the apocalyptic tale he and Pratchett wrote together. It follows the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and the demon Crowley (David Tennant) as they attempt to prevent the end times.

Directed entirely by Douglas Mackinnon (Doctor Who, Outlander), the series has an all-star cast largely from Gaiman’s personal contacts, including Jon Hamm, Josie Lawrence, Adria Arjona, Michael McKean, Jack Whitehall, Miranda Richardson, and Nick Offerman. Many of them, Gaiman says, were fans of the novel. Together, they ultimately just wanted to respect Pratchett’s wishes for a good adaptation.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What was your approach in figuring out what the story needed to work as a miniseries?

Picking up a copy of the book that’s about 360 pages long in this edition and putting in a Post-it note every 60 pages. That gives us six episodes. And then looking at each 60-page chunk, looking at episode 3, going, “That’s weird, Crowley and Aziraphale aren’t in this one. Why don’t I just do a sort of pre-credit sequence — just the 6,000 years of human history where you get to find out how they got where they were?”

Get to episode 6, go, “That’s interesting, if I shoot it like this, I’m going to run out of plot halfway through the episode, and then it’s going to get really dull. I’m going to have to fix that, but I don’t know how yet. I’ll figure it out. I do know the angels are in it. And I do know hell is in it. Now I’m going to start, and let’s see where that takes us.” And that really was the process.

Terry was in a coma, I think, at the point when I was doing that. I got a letter from him, saying, “Please do this for me.” And then he died, and I flew to England. I did a 48-hour round trip, went to the funeral, flew home, landed, and started writing episode 1, in a world in which nothing seemed very funny. That was the process. Write it script by script, just try to envision the television series that I would like to see.

We had talked, Terry and I, a lot about the angels. The angels actually showed up in a first draft of the Good Omens film script we did. For some reason, the studio couldn’t come to terms with the idea of Aziraphale owning a bookshop, so he had to work in the British Museum. So there was a scene where he was pursued through the British Museum by angels flicking on their halos then throwing them like killer Frisbees.

It was just that thing of going, “Okay, we need angels in here to balance everything out. We need a few more. We’ve got a couple of demons.” I was like, “Okay, let’s see heaven, let’s see hell.” That all really just grew organically. And by the time I got to episode 6, all of the solutions to my clock problems were just waiting for me in there.

At heart, Amazon’s Good Omens is a gay cosmic rom-com

How much of Gabriel’s persona and character were on the page before Jon Hamm came in?

All of it. I went, “Okay, I need somebody who has to be bigger, better-looking, and better-dressed than Aziraphale. They need to be able to deliver these lines with absolute certainty of their own rightness. And you have to want to hit them in the face all the time.” And so I wrote an email to Jon Hamm and said, “Jon, you told me once that Good Omens was one of your favorite books 20 years ago. Would you like to be the angel Gabriel? This is what he is. And, by the way, he’s not in the book.” And I got a one-word email back, which just said, “Yes.” So now I had a Jon Hamm.

That reveals a lot about the book’s huge fan base.

Which is why Michael [Sheen] did it. And Sister Mary, Nina Sosanya. She read it first when she was 15, and she’s read it every year since, and she loves it. She was the first actor we got, who crystallized for me, “Okay, this is the kind of performance that we need.” Up until that point, we’d been auditioning nuns, and they all knew the thing was funny, so we were getting funny performances from them. And it was like, “No, do what Nina’s doing, where she plays it absolutely and utterly straight, and it’s hilarious.”

Did you have any brain trust or producers you consulted about the changes you were making to the story?

The most important one was Rob Wilkins, who is Terry Pratchett’s representative on Earth. I remember the point where I figured out what I was going to do in episode 6, how I was going to get a plot that ran all the way through the end. And the idea that I was going to start episode 6 with Crowley’s trial. I remember texting Rob, “Oh, this is so fucking clever.”

When we were working on the scripts, [we were working exclusively] with the BBC. The BBC didn’t give the kind of notes you might expect from a studio, I think partly because they knew it had gone so far beyond their budget from like halfway through episode 1. They were like, “We’ll just let him write.” And then we got to take those scripts to Amazon [which co-produced the series], and they’re like, “Oh, we love this. Okay.” So it was very simple.

But there were surprises all the way through the very, very end. Some of it was the show wasn’t done until every bit of it was done, which included the graphics, the voices, the last VFX, the grading, the coloring. Suddenly, it’s like, “Oh, that’s what we made.”

Do you feel pressure from knowing this has to be the definitive best adaptation it could be?

No. All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked. It wasn’t like, “Make the best thing.” I like to think of things like this almost as school plays. “Here’s our school play of Good Omens. We’ve got Michael and David. We have Frances McDormand and Benedict Cumberbatch, Nick Offerman, Nina Sosanya, Miranda Richardson, Adria Arjona, Jack Whitehall, all of these great people in it. But you can put on your school play next year.”

How does it feel to know your version is out there?

Wonderful, really wonderful. Mostly because I feel like I’ve been… it’s like in a cartoon, where somebody goes into the laboratory, and then you just see the “keep out” sign, and you hear hammering for a while, and suddenly the door opens, and there is the robot or whatever they’ve been making. And now I’m letting everybody see the robot. And that is so exciting. This is four years of my life, and I loved it, and I’m really looking forward to it being done.

From everything you’ve said publicly over the years, it seems like this was a really great experience you look forward to never having again.

Yeah, I was not put on this planet to have to argue with someone about fucking budgets.

The things you do for Terry.

Yeah, there was an awful lot of “Great, you lumbered me with this, and then you buggered off.”

Probably the biggest reason I’m thrilled to have done it is a kind of proof of concept. Over the years, I’ve made lots of things, and they’re all a bit odd, but I’ve always loved that. You look at Anansi Boys, Coraline, The Ocean at The End of the Lane, they’re not like other things. Sandman, it’s not like other things.

A lot of them have been adapted, some of them adapted really well, and a lot of them have failed to actually go to the screen. But there’s definitely a level on which I wind up feeling like I can point at something and go, “I think it would be really good if you did that thing that’s in the book because I think it will work.”

The lovely thing about Good Omens [the miniseries] is that it’s still Good Omens. If you loved the book, this is that thing that you loved. And I will make you fall in love even more with Sergeant Shadwell. I will make you fall even more in love with Newt than you thought you could, I hope. It does demonstrate that I do kind of know what I’m talking about, which is a nice thing to know.

The adaptation process must feel like watching something you’ve said translated into a different language.

There’s also just the feeling of wanting to demonstrate to people that this stuff actually does work as written. It doesn’t have to be fixed. The number of adaptations of Sandman I have read over the years — mostly, I watch people trying desperately to fix the things they think are broken in it. I look at it and I go, “Actually, this works, and you’d be much better off if you just did the thing I did. Then it would work.”

So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isn’t completely different from the original. It’s not out of left field.

The biggest changes from the book to the show all seem to reflect it becoming the story of two friends.

It’s true. Although, if you told me that when I sat down to write it, I might have been quite surprised. It became very apparent when I was writing that the song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” is a better place to end the television show than [the place where the book ended].

You had Tori Amos record an original cover of that song, which is an old standard. What’s its significance here?

It’s an English song, although I believe it was written before the war, by an expat from France. [Note: The song was written in 1939, with lyrics by Eric Maschwitz and music by Manning Sherwin.] And it just lists the strange things that happen one night that have never happened before.

The book has the line “for the first time ever, a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.” That was mine because I liked that idea that, for once, a nightingale actually did sing in Berkeley Square. The whole point of [the song] is, there are all these things that never happened except this one time… and there’s a lyric about “there were angels dining at the Ritz.”

And then while writing, I spent probably four days listening to versions of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Every version on Spotify, every version on YouTube, going, “There’s a version I have in my head that I need to finish with. It’s got to be dinner piano, and it has to go into somebody singing it and breaking your heart.”

I listened to version after version, and [the one I envisioned] didn’t exist. So I reached out to Tori Amos [a longtime friend] and said, “Please come into the cutting room, I want to show you stuff.” And I showed her what we were doing and showed her the end, and I just said, “Look, will you do this thing? Going from dinner piano, we’ll bring in some strings, but I want you to sing the song.”

All I requested of her was just the first verse or two, and she actually does three verses and a little wrap-up. It seems to be the only time I’ve ever run into people that say they’ve sat and watched the whole of the credits, just because they wanted to listen to Tori singing and find out how it ended.

It’s a nice cherry on this sundae because so much of Good Omens is built around people you already knew.

These are my friends. Like I said, it’s like a school play.

You’ve said you never want to be a showrunner again, but what about this experience do you plan to use in the future?

I think it will be much harder for a future showrunner to bullshit me. I think there are definitely places where I will be firmer on things where I wouldn’t have necessarily been in the past. I’m still going to be writing scripts, I’m still going to be making things. I just don’t ever want to showrun a six-episode thing again.