In Earth Abides, a highly contagious plague devastates the planet, leading to the near extinction of humanity. As society’s intricate systems begin to collapse, a handful of survivors remain to learn to navigate their new lives and confront the grim reality of their dwindling existence. The post-apocalyptic series, which premieres tonight on MGM+, is based on the novel by George R. Stewart.

The series stars Alexander Ludwig as Ish and Jessica Frances Dukes as Emma, and is created and executive produced by Todd Komarnicki alongside executive producers Kearie Peak, Michael Phillips, and Juliana Maio.

Recently, Komarnicki and Peak spoke with SciFi Vision about adapting from the book to the series, creating large spans of time, and the visual look of the series.

Watch the full interview below, and tune in to Earth Abides on MGM+.



SCIFI VISION:   To start off, talk about sort of how you decided what you took from the book versus what you changed and added and everything else.

TODD KOMARNICKI:   Yeah, the main thing we took from the book were the deep and abiding themes, you know, starting over, a community, how do you trust? Who do you trust? How do you find love? How do you raise a family? All those things that are just the bedrock of the book. The question that the book asks, “Hey, what if this happened to you? If you were the last person alive, what would you do? How fast would you drive? How desperate and sad would you get? How much would you need to find love and start over again?”

So, we kept that. Then, when you have six episodes to do it, it's really leaning into the twists and turns, because even though this is a deeply emotional show about human beings interacting, it's also loaded with unexpected twists.

So, the storytelling, the life and death aspect of all that, that's really where we turned it into a series by grabbing people emotionally and then keeping them with the thrills.

KEARIE PEAK:   I would say in adapting from the book also, it was a bit like a puzzle, trying to find the specific scenes that would incorporate what took many scenes in the book, and putting it into one to tell the story, like Ish having to kill his first animal in his entire life. He's only shopped to eat. He's never killed and hunted before. So, I think that particular scene really encapsulated a lot of themes of the book. So, we went through and just found certain scenes that could tell many themes and stories.

SCIFI VISION:   Was it hard dealing with such long time spans in only six episodes? Because that's not something you normally see.

TODD KOMARNICKI:   Yeah, it's a high wire act, but what we chose to do was use those time jumps as organic transitions. So, they were big moments. They were births. They were happy birthdays. They were sudden drought that you could believe the time had gone by and see even new actors portraying kids that have grown up and be so caught up in the story turn that you weren't worried about how long it had taken.

And I think those transitions really work. So, despite it taking place over fifty years, it plays out, I think, very smoothly.

SCIFI VISION:   Now talk about some of the design of the sort of desolate landscape, everything destroyed. Because I know some of what we saw wasn't complete, but I'm just kind of curious if you could talk about sort of how you decided what you did and everything.

KEARIE PEAK:   Do you mean for the look of it?

SCIFI VISION:   Yeah, for the overall look of the landscape, because a lot of it's run down, like the bridge [and] that kind of thing.

KEARIE PEAK:   This was really fun. In the very beginning, we created a timeline that was given to all the departments from hair and makeup to visual effects, wardrobe and special effects. And then working with each person in each department to help age appropriately and keep them all in line.

That was a high wire act, but it was really fun working with visual effects and taking a shot that's now and saying, “Okay, now here's where it's seven years. Do you think it would look like this at seven years? Let's research it a little bit and figure it out. Okay. What would it look like at ten years? I think we would probably have trees coming through the ground here. Let's go ahead and put them through.” So, that was tricky, creating the timeline in the story, but showing the decay of civilization and the rise of the earth was really fun.

TODD KOMARNICKI:   And I want to underline the deep gratitude that I have for the rigorous nature of what Kearie is talking about. Kearie was always on top of what is the macro. When I would be in the micro and having to write dialogue or scenes or emotions, it was hard for me to keep on top of exactly where the trees were aging out the window. Kearie was just expert at always keeping the show on the right track, no matter what year we were shooting, especially when you shoot out of order sometimes. So, anyway, God bless Kearie Peak is the point of that.