Owing to his commitment to HBO, Martin wasn’t permitted to work on the show in an official capacity, but after writing the script for the pilot Buhler made sure Martin got hold of a copy. Instead of having him board the writing team, Buhler did the next best thing: he developed a relationship with Martin and kept him in the loop, going to him for advice and feedback.
Though the show takes place mostly in space (with a few flashbacks to life on Earth before the mission began), it’s far from a space opera. “A lot of sci-fi shows that have been coming out sort of fit into the loose category of space opera, but I would put us squarely in the horror camp,” Buhler tells us. “I would also say that we have a more conceptual approach to storytelling. There’s a little bit of David Lynch in there and a little bit of David Cronenberg. There’s a little bit of Ridley Scott and of course there’s a bit of Stanley Kubrick across the whole thing, as he’s that great giant on the hill whose shadow is cast across the entire genre. Instead of trying to run away from the huge influences we try to embrace them. I think there’s an element of cinematic fanboy geekdom in there. So people who are fans of horror or sci-fi will recognised lots of Easter eggs and treasures scattered throughout the show, which I think is a slightly different approach to horror straight down the line.”
Buhler reckons the show’s characters are also a little out of the ordinary. “You’re not going to see a lot of heroes or bad guys in this show,” he explains. “We don’t have people who are on one team of the other. Everybody is broken. Everybody is good and bad. There’s a lot of complexity. There’s a lot of people that are doing very frustrating things.”
Like many of us, Buhler loves seeing good people making bad choices when it comes to storytelling. “We make bad decisions all the time and there are ramifications for those, so we see people making mistakes, and following their hearts when they should be following their minds, and following their minds when they should be following their hearts. So there’s a lot of fun character dynamics. We have an incredibly talented cast. When we were casting the show we were looking for characters who were talented but could embody real characters as people. We didn’t want to make television characters. We weren’t looking for a particular aesthetic. We wanted people who felt like they could be from anywhere in the world, and could be grounded and realistic and complex.”
