Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week characters Climate and Consequences. Earlier this year, a new TV show came out that caused quite a stir in the climate world. It's called Extrapolations, and it starts in the year twenty thirty seven, where the chaotic effects of climate change have become embedded into everyday lives. Of course, you don't have to go years out into the future to see how climate change is affecting the world. Climate change is already part of our story.
As one of the executive producers of the show, Dorothy Fortenberry points out.
You know, people talk about climate fiction as though it's this particular genre, and they'll ask us, oh, so you're making a science fiction show about climate and I'll always say, well, actually, all of the current shows on TV that are taking place right now or in the near future that don't portray climate change like those are the science fiction shows.
It is currently happening.
We are already living in a one point one to Grace elcias res in a.
World written by Scott z Burns and featuring almost as many A listers as a Wes Anderson movie. Extrapolations plays out over forty years. In each episode, the temperature is a little bit hotter and the planet a little less hospital and even though the world changes, people largely stay the same.
If God made humans in his image, why do they suck?
Or did we just evolve into sacking.
This is from an episode about a girl preparing for her bath Mitzua while dealing with two well worn conflicts that between a teenager and her parents and the Atlantic Ocean versus the city of Miami. Extrapolations is the first TV show to put climate at the center of the drama, not as dystopia, but as part of our current reality. Is the backdrop for a heist, a dinner party, a love story. If you care about climate, this feels like a massive opportunity to get other people on board to
spur action. But no TV showrunner and no streaming service wants to make an eight hour public service announcement. It has to be exciting. So for the last episode in our series exploring climate storytelling, Dorothy joins me in New York City to talk about how the Extrapolations team actually went about making the show, the decisions they made while telling a story about climate and the growing demand for these kinds of stories. It's worth noting that this interview
was recorded before the writers strike. Dorothy, Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Now, I've watched the series and I had a lot of feelings for many of the characters. But before I bring in my opinions, how would you describe Extrapolations?
I would say that Extrapolations is an eight episode limited series with interconnected stories about how climate change affects every aspect of our lives. There are stories about parents and children, there are stories about communities, there are stories about friends. And it's a way of looking at not the question of is climate change real? But what does it feel like? What does it feel like to live in a world whose climate is changing and has changed?
And you're a writer, playwright and producer. Before working on Extrapolations, you worked on The Handmade Stale. What did you learn from making a series like that which is dystopian in its nature but is based on some true things and then takes it further.
I think the approach the markt Atwood took and creating Handmaid's Tale was very similar to the approach that we took in terms of not wanting to jump too far afield, not wanting to leap to an extreme, different.
Outlier, odd place.
I think those stories can be great, no disrespect to stories that take place in a very different universe. But I think in Handmaid's Tale, as you said, she made a point of having every single oppressive, repressive, theocratic thing that happened to women in that book have already occurred to some specific group of women previously in history. It always had a basis in some previous atrocity, some previous
form of exploitation. And I think when we were coming up with the thoughts for extrapolations, that idea of it's just you know, it's the house next door, right to reality, it's just one over, It's not, you know, in a totally different neighborhood and in a totally different planet, it's pretty close was definitely something that we thought about, certainly with the first couple episodes. Handmaid's Tale takes place in
a very condensed chunk of time. Episodes unfold, you know, the day after or a few weeks after, a few months after previous episodes. Often seasons pick up seconds later. With extrapolations we were unfolding from twenty thirty seven to twenty seventy, so we had a much longer time frame, and we were able to start the early episodes in a future that felt approachable and relatable and pretty close to today, and then kind of turn up the dial on the futureyness so that by the final episodes it
is pretty different. The clothes are pretty different, the rooms look pretty different, the technology is pretty different. And we also worked really hard to make sure there were a mix of technologies and a mix of costume pieces, like we are now in twenty twenty three. I am wearing a watch with a canvas band. Right, I'm wearing a very old fashioned watch. This watch could have existed in nineteen fifty or nineteen eighty. I'm currently wearing it in
twenty twenty three. And we try to bring that spirit to all of our decisions, that people don't just get handed and outfit when they show up in a year and say like, okay, you know your head to toe, all your technology, all your clothes are from the future. People are always collecting a mix of things.
There's a different year typically in every episode, and there's a different temperature at which the planet has warmed. Scientists are able to plan many future scenarios based on the agency that humans have today. So Extrapolations is essentially a climate science future, but in the episodes, there is one future that is being lived. Every episode is in a different year, the temperature is different. Why is the show called extrapolations and not extrapolation?
We are coming up with a set of potential possibilities, and our guiding question when we were trying to pick what future to show would be what if we kept ongoing with current trends. So we were writing the show in twenty twenty twenty twenty one, continued making it in twenty twenty two, it's on the air in twenty twenty three, so we were really looking around at what was happening right at that moment, and our philosophical conceptual framework was
what if we just keep going as is? What if we don't get drastically worse, but we also don't get drastically better, we don't invest in different technologies, we continue current rates of deforestation, all those sorts of things. And I think keeping it as extrapolations plural is a way of saying, if we keep going as is, then one thing leads to the next thing. The decisions made in episode one in twenty thirty seven play out in twenty seventy.
We really wanted to show people that choices made in one decade have consequences in another decade, that we are already coming into the series after a set of choices has been made between twenty twenty two and twenty thirty seven, and then picking up and going, well, if those were made, then what about the next thing? What about the next thing? What about the next thing? If you look at the font, this is just something I'm proud of, So I'm going to talk about it.
Oh, I love the fun Thank you.
I'm very proud of that fought. Our ideal with the font was that it starts pretty bold, you know, the E of extrapolations is pretty bold, and by the time you get to the S, it's pretty thin, because we're imagining into a future, and the further away we get, the less confident our predictions can be.
By episode eight, the final episode, it's seventy and the earth is two point five eight degrees celsius. Now you were thinking about scenarios that would be realistic from the world that you were building it in, which was twenty twenty twenty twenty one. At the time, you know, we were thinking the warmest we could get on business as usual would be two point three degrees celsius. Two point six is actually pushing it because every point one degree
celsius makes the planet so much worse. So what went into thinking two point six is the kind of realistic place where we'll end up.
I think it was based in the notion that countries wouldn't actually meet their targets. I think it is a I don't want to say cynical, but it's a sort of glass half empty view of the commitments. So people make these commitments. We show a cop in episode one. You know, we try to talk about how we come to these agreements, but I think we were trying to say that you can make all these agreements, make all these pledges, but is that actually something that you're doing
or is that just something that you pledged to? And in our world, it is a world where institutions and politicians are not successful at meeting the challenge. You know, I was gratified when the IRA passed because it was already something that was better than we had imagined in our future.
Right, the inflation reduction Act passed in twenty twenty two, right in the middle of making the.
Show exactly, and we had already filmed it, and we had created a world with no Ira, so already reality had done a superior job to our characters. But in twenty and twenty twenty one, when we were imagining it, we didn't know. And I think it was very plausible to believe in those years that there would not be you know, climate legislation passed in the US. So I think our two point six target was a depressing version
of reality. Like it's not an optimistic view. It's not a view of what if we do everything right, But it's also not a horror show where everything has to go horribly wrong. We just have to kind of suck a little bit and fail a little bit for it to be pretty horrible. And I also think that one of our real goals is to try to translate numbers on a graph into experiences and feelings.
You know.
Some of this gets down to like the United States not adopting the metric system, you know, I think it's a huge climate problem. Like if I could go back and try and change like three things, one of them would be to get the us to adopt the metric system because everyone I know who hears one point five or two point five, they think it's degrees fahrenheit because we're used to as Americans thinking in degrees fahrenheit, and
it radically underestimates the problem just in this form of math. Right, So we in the show actually balance between talking about celsius and talking in fahrenheit, and we sometimes have characters describe things in fahrenheit, which would be a little bit unusual given who they are, as a way of reaching the American audience and setting. I mean, it's so subtle, but we're trying to say, like these numbers have a feeling.
Now in telling a climate story, how do you generate a sense that what we are seeing on the screen in front of us isn't the only way forward.
That is a huge question and one that we really struggled with and that I think climate fiction in general has to tackle. And I think it's really tricky. There haven't been a ton of climate movies, but the ones that there have been, things like The Day After Tomorrow,
have often been natural disaster focused, kind of apocalyptic. Everything is ending, it's the final collapse, and I think something that's tricky about that is if you say climate change equals the total collapse of everything, then any moment short of the total collapse of everything must not be climate change. And what we were trying to show was things can be quite quite bad while you still go to work, you still watch TV, you still do the cross red puzzle,
you still live your regular life. But we definitely didn't want to inspire a sense of fatalism. The last thing we wanted to do was say like, this is how it is and it can't be any different. I think there are two ways that we try to tackle it. One is showing characters always struggling in their own stories and in their own ways to make decisions. So our characters are in a certain situation because of the decisions
made by other people, but they always have agency. It's not stories of people who are just kind of buffeted by the fates. They're always having to decide what do I do now, where do I go now? How do I act now? And I think our hope is that in watching that people will ask those same questions of themselves.
And yet at the end of the series spoiler alert here, you conclude after a code case that human flaws are unfixable.
You know.
The problem that's never been technology.
The problem is us always has been. What we're trying to say is that people are the ingredients of everything. You know, it's like soylent green like it's all made of people. People are institutions. People are the people who come up with the technology. So again, to get a little spoilery, there is a technology in episode eight that is really revolutionary, and the question is what do we do with it? It is deployed in a certain way at a certain time by a certain set of people
in that episode. But I think the question in the episode remains if it had been deployed differently, if it had been deployed earlier, by a different set of people with a different agenda, it could have really done a lot of good. So to me, one of the most important things that we talk about is human institutions and the tension between very powerful individuals and then institutions. Can we build a un can we build a religious community?
Can we build international criminal court? Can we build a United States government?
Can we build.
Any institution out of regular people that is robust enough to resist the influence of one rogue person who has a ton of money in power, and I think that's a question that we really grapple with in every episode, and we're showing one version of that story, but another version would be, you know, yes, what if the institutions, which are also made of people, also made of flawed but wonderful people, can be more robust, can be more dynamic,
can be more active than one rogue individual's choices matter less.
Typically in a climate story of fossil fuel executive would be the central villain, but you choose to have Nick Bilton, who is played by Kid Harrington, who starts off as a billionaire with this company called Alpha, providing batteries and then eventually social media and services to live forever, essentially all the things that humans want, rather than fossil fuels, which are the main cause of climate change. Why did you choose to make Nick Bilton the central villain of the TV series?
In this case, it was partly about conceptualizing a lot of different phenomena in one person, because it's a TV show and we have to hire an actor, and having somebody portray the entire fossil fuel industry is harder than having one person show up and kind of portray all of human desire, as you were saying. But I think what we most wanted to get across with that character is that climate can be an economic opportunity for peace people,
and we have to be prepared for that. It's going to be an economic devastation for a lot of people, but someone out there is going to make money off of it, and we have to sort of prep for
and imagine that. I also think we really wanted to get the concept of predatory delay, That this is not a character who is avoiding the transition to a green economy entirely, but this is a character who's putting his feet on the brakes, and that that's also something that a lot of corporations and people are thinking about, is they can say, well, we know we're going to get
there eventually, but just not today. And we wanted to have one person as the avatar of that kind of philosophy and that kind of belief.
After the break, I talked with Dorothy about why so many A List actors wanted to be part of Extrapolations and how she's working with other writers to make more TV shows like it. If you're enjoying Zero and the series, please take a moment to write us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Thank you.
A portion of our audience are climate nerds, and they'll watch the series and they'll connect the science to the reality. And you would have, I assume, had to work hard to make sure that the science is accurate. Who did you tap and what were the conversations you had around making sure the possible futures, whether it's a drought, whether it's a heat wave, whether it's wet bulb temperature or accurate.
Scott and the writer's room met with a bunch of different people before I joined the project. So in that writer's room, I know that they spoke to Bill mckibbon, They spoke to Elizabeth Kolbert, they spoke to Nicole Hernandez and other people whose names I can't remember right now, but a lot of different scientists, activists, journalists. Because we
did want to make the science accurate. We were trying to strike a balance where if you were a climate nerd and you think about this all day long, and you eat and sleep and breathe it, you would not be so turned off by our inaccuracies as to not watch the show like you might go like, Eh, that's not you know, one thousand billion percent perfect, but like I get it. You know, you would feel like we had done our homework. You would feel like we were respectful.
We also had researchers on staff throughout the whole process, through all of writing and all of production, to provide research for anybody who needed it. So if someone was writing an episode and we talk about wet bulb temperature, they could just email the researcher and be like, send me everything about what wet bulb is, how it works, what physic consequences would happen if someone were outside in a high degree wet bulb situation, What would happen to their organs?
What would happen to their bodies? Who's off run him?
WHOZI you're additional cargo?
What's wrong with them?
Idiot was out collecting data during goddamn daylight.
When we're bounce back to thirty five, he should be dead.
One thing I learned working on this project is that people who work in the climate space, especially scientists and researchers, were so happy to talk to us. I always felt awkward contacting them because I was like, oh my gosh, you're so important. And busy, and you're gathering all this data and you're teaching classes and you're writing books, like you probably don't have any time for me. But everybody always said, you're going to reach so many more people.
You know, you're going to make a TV show. Hopefully lots of people will watch it. Not everyone's going to read this article that I'm preparing for this journal, but I know that people will watch a TV show. So of course, of course I want to work with you. And I was really heartened by how eager people were to come, you know, join and we were able to get a glacier scientist from NASA to come and talk about glaciers, and people just want to share their research.
Yeah, this is a generosity within the climate sphere in general, not just and academia, but even within rival journalists and competitive startups. That is just one that's wonderful to see. There's more for collaboration than there's for competition.
Yeah, people were so generous, People were so kind, people were so available to any question that we had to try to make the show as accurate as possible, And it really surprised me and warmed my heart.
Extra Pollutions has a star studded cast Sienna Miller, Kid Harrington, Edward Norton, Toby McGuire, and even Merrill Streep doing the voice of a vail.
We who are us share the world all that is there.
When it becomes less suity.
What does it say that so many big names wanted to work on a climate TV show?
I think it shows how eager people are. I mean it felt sort of like the conversations with the scientists where you call up and you say, hi, I'm working on climate change, and people want to hear what you have to say next. You know, if the scripts were terrible, I don't know that they would have come and joined. I hope that they also liked the directors, they liked the designers, they liked Scott. But I do think there
is a hunger and an eagerness. It felt like something that was sort of bottled up, really looking for release, And when people found out we were doing the show, they were excited to come on board because they're thinking about climate change and to think about it and not be able to act on it feels bananas. And so to actually get to do something where you are putting your concern into acting is really liberating.
Since you've finished the show and it's now streaming, you have continued to work with writers who are interested in telling climate stories. What's that been.
Like, Oh, that's been great.
So I in a couple of different capacities, am trying to help all the other people who want to tell climate stories, sort of like you were saying about the generosity between journalists or between entrepreneurs.
Like bussing it on.
Yeah, I hope I put myself out of business. I hope I can't sell anything because there are other better climate storytellers out there. So one capacity has been with the Writers Guild. The WGA and the PGA have created a Climate Storytelling Action Group, and we did a series of workshops with the NRDC because the NRDC has also gotten very interested in climate storytelling.
Right, there's a National Resources Defense Counsel or US Climate Philanthropy.
Yeah, so it's an environmental nonprofit and they've in the last five years or so gotten very invested in this question of where's climate on screen? How do we tell climate stories? So we did a series of workshops with writers just sort of laying the groundwork of here's what climate change is, you know, here's how it functions. Here are ways it could be in stories. I'm also a mentor for the NRDC has a program I think it's called Rewrite the Future. They pair young screenwriters with not
young screenwriters. And I'm about to meet on Monday with a woman who's written a climate television pilot to talk to her about her climate television pilot. You know, my advice that she can take her leave, but how to tell climate stories.
You're collaborator on this. Scott C. Burns said. One of the inspirations for doing this was a book written by Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement. And the case that Amitav has made is that fiction writers, I'm not thinking about climate change enough. Not that there isn't climate fiction where you take a certain future and run with it and see what characters do in that future. He's more concerned about climate change as it's happening now or in
the believable real world. Would you characterize what extrapolations is it's closer to Amitav's call for fiction or is it climate fiction?
I think it's much closer to fiction that is based in reality. You know, people talk about climate fiction as though it's this particular genre, and they'll ask us, oh, so you're making a science fiction show about climate and I'll always say, well, actually, all of the current shows on TV that are taking place right now or in the near future that don't portray climate change like those
are the science fiction shows. Those are the shows that are taking an imaginative leap because it is currently happening. We are already living in a one point one degrece elsius is in a world. I mean the number of times that I'll see something in the news that looks like something that we shot is daily.
It'd probably says something about me that my favorite episode was episode four, which is really an exploration of geoengineering. It's focused so much on the geopolitics, on the decision making, on the science and the uncertainties.
In the past, I was an advocate for something called geoengineering. Okay, and my very famous ex wife and I put a lot of resource and focus into not just imagining it, but contemplating how would you actually do it?
She called it the biggest and the brightest new business opportunity of the century At Davos.
Here's the thing we were wrong.
Geoengineering is a subject that just rubs people one way or the other and creates all these controversies, and to portray it in a way that gets those points across while feeling compelling was really well done.
Thank you.
I loved working on episode four. I had a great time I was on set. I think every day I think. Something about Episode four that I also hope people take away is that climate change contains a ton of controversies. The controversy is not is it happening. That's not a controversy. It's happening. The world is warmart we did it, But within that, what do we do about it? Is an open and live question, and lots of really smart, thoughtful people have really different feelings and thoughts about that, and
that makes good television. You know, an argument about do we do this or do we not do this? I hope we gave both sides of that argument the best possible case to make. Like that was our intention is we didn't want to make anybody mean or bad, or dumb or inarticulate. We wanted them to be the brightest and most passionate advocates for their point of view, so that people could watch that debate play out and come to their own conclusions.
And because it's about the future, the future does actually get better in many ways. There are technologies like a drug that is printed at home. But the other side of the coin, I come from India. I grew up there. I now live in the UK, but a lot of the episodes, apart from the one India episode, are based very much in the US, have very much the sort of rich people living their lives in comfortable surroundings in really nice houses. How did you choose to focus mostly on that world?
Some of that was about who we felt our audience would be. You know, it's a show on Apple TV plus. Apple tv plus subscribers are mostly people who have a little bit of extra disposable income, mostly live in the West, and I think we wanted to say that this is a show that shows that their own lives will be disrupted. I think it's really complicated and tricky when you talk about a universal problem with disparate impact, as I think
we saw with COVID. We don't want to say that you'll be fine, but you also do want to say we won't all experience it equally, And that was I think the conversation we were trying to straddle was to say, hey, upper middle class Apple TV Plus watchers, this could come for you too. This could impact a child in your family's health, This could impact you know, houses in Malibu catch on fire as well. You know, we didn't want to say just because you're wealthy, you'll be able to
insulate yourself completely. But it is tricky. I certainly think there are episodes we could have done that focused more on other countries, that focused more on not rich people within the US. We're capturing a certain slice of certain lives, and there's a lot that we left on the table in terms of other lives and other lifestyles that we didn't show.
Is there a risk that people watch the show, especially wealthy people, and go, it's not the complete shit show that we thought it will be. Therefore, I don't need to worry about it as much as people think I should worry about it.
I guess there's a risk of that.
I feel like it's pretty bleak by the time you get to episode seven, like people are in you know, oxygen masks and you know, roaming a you know, I think it's pretty bleak, and I would hope that even very rich people can watch it and say I'd rather not know.
Thank you.
Will there be a season two? Man?
I hope.
So that's not my choice, that's Apple's choice. But I know that Scott and I have a lot of other stories, especially the stories that we were talking about that we weren't able to tell, that we would love to get to tell in a season two.
Which would be a different extra relations where maybe we actually keep it under one point five degree celsias.
Yeah. I mean that's the great thing about the conceit of the show, as we can extrapolate in any direction we want.
I could talk about this for a long time. There was so much in there in the TV series that I think we didn't explore, And I hope viewers get to watch extra pay and maybe there's a season two. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me.
If you watch extrapolations, tweet at me and tell me who your favorite character was. Mine is Madam from episode four. You heard a clip of her earlier talking about the idiot who went out during a wet bulb temperature event. This is part three of our mini series talking about climate storytelling. I hope you've enjoyed the series. If you've not already listened to the other episodes, check out our interviews with climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and investigative
journalist Amy Westerbelt. Thank you for listening to Zero. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Send it to a friend or someone who spends longer working out what to watch on TV than actually watching TV. Get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Driskell. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks this week
to John frar Mesabo and Kira Bindr. I'm Akshatrati back next week.