WGN America's Manhattan is a dramatic retelling of the story about the men and women behind the making of the atomic bomb. But rather than tell the story that viewers already know, the series focuses on the lives of the people who lived and worked in the Los Alamos facility associated with the Manhattan Project.
In its first season, Manhattan dealt with the living situation at Los Alamos, which wasn't always ideal: the scientists working on the project, as well as their families, lived in isolated conditions in the middle of the New Mexican desert. Due to the project's secrecy, scientists could not tell their spouses and families about what they were doing, which led to a lot of conflicts in these relationships.
Manhattan's second season, though, raises the stakes: the new season focuses on the Trinity Test. Historically, this test was the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon. So what happened at Los Alamos when the atomic bomb went from being a concept to a reality? How did those working at Los Alamos deal with the fact that they created something that could kill tens of thousands of people?
In an interview with Tech Times, Manhattan's creator and executive producer Sam Shaw and executive producer and director Thomas Schlamme discussed the implications of the Trinity Test and how it affects the show's characters in the second season.
"The first season was a story about a bunch of scientists who became involved in a war and became combatants, in a way," said Shaw. "But for them, last year, this weapon was still kind of an an abstraction – it existed mostly as mathematics on blackboards. And so the transition from last season to this season is really the shift from the abstract to the real."
Shaw also stated that because the bomb becomes real this season, viewers will see the characters struggling with the morality of the project itself.
"For all of these characters, in different ways, in this season, they have to grapple with what it means to be building not just a science project, but a weapon," says Shaw. "And that's really what the storytelling is all about: being confronted with the morality of this thing that they've wrought, for good or for ill."
The first season also saw many of Manhattan's characters beginning to question their identities, as well as their relationships with their families and friends. The story in season one was almost a coming of age story for some of those characters. However, their new reality in season two rushes the process.
"When that happens, you are then confronted with who you are," said Schlamme. "And I think this season becomes much clearer about these people trying to define themselves in this very heightened world. During the first year, they were freshmen in school. Now, they almost jumped to being seniors very quickly, so they have to come to terms with what it is in their own lives they want and need."
One of the main themes of the first season of Manhattan revolved around paranoia and secrecy. Not only did the Manhattan Project require these people to live on an isolated base in the desert, but it often meant that everyone, at some point in their lives at Los Alamos, kept secrets from each other: this occurred not only among families, but also among friends and fellow scientists. This created paranoia, especially during the season finale, when the scientific team realizes that there's a spy in their midst.
Although Schlamme believes that secrecy and paranoia play a large part in season two, the story this year is about what happens once some of those secrets get revealed.
"In season one, very few people revealed their secret," said Schlamme. "When Frank reveals something, he's revealing it to, basically, no one there in front of him. He feels like he's talking to Liza, but he's not. In this season, people are actually talking to each other about their secrets. And certain secrets get powerfully revealed by the end of the season."
However, revealing secrets also has ramifications, sometimes good, but also sometimes bad.
"A lot of the storytelling this year is about the consequences of revealing secrets," said Shaw. "Sometimes, there's a great catharsis in relationships – they're healed – when secrets are revealed. And sometimes, they're not: they're destroyed."
Manhattan's main goal is to tell a dramatic story, but at the same time, there's a lot of science and history used on the series to keep it feeling authentic to viewers. Of course, a show like Manhattan needs a delicate balance in its writing to keep viewers tuned in, as well as to keep from going over viewers' heads with complicated physics equations. Both Shaw and Schlamme feel that Manhattan hits that delicate balance.
"For the writers, we're all fascinated by the history and the science," said Shaw. "It's incredible raw material to work with, but our show is not a history lesson, it's not a science lesson, we're not trying to sort of hide the peas in the mashed potatoes and teach somebody something about physics. For us, the challenge was finding the way to use the historical setting and to use the physics as an engine for character storytelling, to the extent that the science can help us reveal what is it that makes these human beings tick. And it becomes useful to us and that's a really exciting challenge. There aren't a huge number of models for us in terms of figuring out how to do that."
Season two of Manhattan airs on WGN America on Oct. 13 at 9 p.m. EDT.
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