The Crossing showrunners talk influences and mystery in new series

ABC’s The Crossing will debut on April 2 and the showrunners, Jay Beattie and Dan Dworkin, share the movies and literature that influenced the series, along with the mystery and questions that will be raised.

The Crossing is one of the newest shows coming to ABC on April 2, bringing you a LOST feeling with a Terminator/Dark Angel twist. It brings the story of a refugee crisis with a sci-fi twist that certainly will not disappoint. The trailer alone will pull you in with questions about where the refugees have come from, what their world is like and what it means for the people of Port Canaan.

Showrunners Jay Beattie and Dan Dworkin took time out for this exclusive interview with Hidden Remote. We talked about the influences for the series, the foreshadowing within the pilot and Season 1, and the mystery involved. If you loved LOST initially but got bored of the constant single question never being answered, you will love the way The Crossing handles that mistake.

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The Crossing stars Steve Zahn, who plays Sheriff Jude Ellis of Port Canaan. He just wanted a quiet life to reassess past decisions but his plans change when refugees from a war-torn country wash up on his beach. They want asylum, but there’s a major twist. The refugees are from America, but 180 years into the future. It’s up to Jude and Nestor, his deputy, to figure out what’s going on. Now if only the FBI wouldn’t get in the way.

Meanwhile, Reece (Natalie Martinez) is on a search for her daughter. The two are refugees but Reece was separated in the crossing and lucky to survive. She would have been, anyway, had it not been for the fact that she’s an “Apex,” genetically engineered. The idea of genetically modified humans ring a bell? It did for me, too.

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Hidden Remote: I really got this LOST and Dark Angel vibe:

Jay Beattie & Dan Dworkin: It’s funny. No-one’s mentioned…Dark Angel makes perfect sense thinking about it. You’ve got the pool of people who are refuged on the island and the genetically enhanced ass-kicking female character, who has broken out and is searching for someone.

Was there an island?

LOST!

Oh yeah!

We are both fans of LOST and watched it, so on some level, subconscious or conscious, it was likely an influence, but we definitely drew on The Terminator.

That is a pretty good hybrid. Well done. But we never referenced Dark Angel in the discussions for the show, but now you bringing it up it makes sense.

Wait, how was she enhanced? Was it purely biological or was there nanotechnology?

HR: From what I can remember (it’s been a long time since I’ve watched it), it was purely genetic. There was cat DNA mixed with some shark DNA.

HR: So if Dark Angel never came up, which shows did? LOST has to be one of them.

JB & DD: We are both fans of LOST and watched it, so on some level, subconscious or conscious, it was likely an influence, but we definitely drew on The Terminator. We drew on…I’m especially a fan of writers like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson and people like that, and all of those guys have written great time travel fiction, and when we kind of started thinking about the plight of refugees and fusing it with a sci-fi that gave us this whole idea.

For the town, Jaws was an inspiration. I don’t think there were many TV shows that we referenced when breaking it out.

In retrospect, it’s like a show…there’s a little bit of Orphan Black going on with the kind of underlying conspiracy infused with sci-fi. That was possibly on some level an influence but it mostly came from movies and literature.

HR: And there seems to be some real life thrown in there, like the refugee movement.

JB & DD: For sure. Well, that was the original term of the idea. It was us watching and reading the refugee imagery in the news. Seeing those photos, being affected, both of us being dads, just…your heart breaks when you see the photos, and it compelled us to explore that somehow. That was actually the original kernel of the idea and the sci-fi came into it secondary.

HR: How far into the potential future of this have you planned? Am I right in thinking the whole first season has now been filmed?

JB & DD: Yes, we just filmed the first 10 episodes. Well, pilot + 10. We’re still in post-production on those and we start on April 2. Eleven is the first order.

HR: So, do you have storylines from Season 1 that you can move into a second season? Is there a lot of foreshadowing?

JB & DD: Yes, all of which will become apparent the closer that we get to the finale. At the end of Season 1 you’ll see springboard into Season 2. We have sketches of what Season 2 and even Season 3 could be, but we don’t want to hold too fast to them right now because we know everything evolves. We have broad sketches of what it will be.

HR: LOST has the problem of a lot of questions and minimal answers, making it annoying. Can you learn from their mistakes with The Crossing?

JB & DD: Yes. I think the eternal question for LOST was “where are they?” but we don’t have a question that big looming over our own show, where people get annoyed if they don’t get the answer. We have mystery and questions, but we do try to deliver answers. It’s a delicate balance. We answer questions and ask new ones. That’s the formula we’ve tried to do.

HR: Give people a reason to keep tuning in without getting bored.

JB & DD: Hopefully!

And like any good mystery, not all the refugees are who they appear to be. They all have personal and secret history.

There’s no central mystery question that we eventually have to answer. With shows like that there’s a fair bit of wheel spinning and they just want to get to that answer. We have human drama; just look at the set of characters that represent the refugees on the show. They come from a different time and place and are immediately detained, and we can explore their lives as you would with people seeking citizenship or asylum. There’s a long journey they’ll have to take to citizenship and general happiness. We can explore that for seasons on end alone. We have many other layers and feel we can go for years and years.

And like any good mystery, not all the refugees are who they appear to be. They all have personal and secret history. All that’s going to come into play and that’s just one world on the show. That’s just the world of the refugees. We also have the world of Jude and Nestor; the sheriff’s world. We also have the world of Port Canaan. So it’s fertile and there are lots of layers we can pull back.

HR: That’s right. The pilot has already raised so many questions. The instant it finished I needed the next episode for the answers. But a lot of it is around the refugees. Will we see flashbacks (flash forwards in time) of the future they came from?

JB & DD: There are glimpses, I will say. There are glimpses of the future. Not a lot. We wanted to tell the story from their POV in this place in time as much as possible, but there are flashes in the future.

HR: So, will we mostly get to learn from Jude’s POV?

JB & DD: No, we’ll get everyone’s POV. We learn from the refugees and spend a lot of time with them, whether it’s to Jude or Emma or whoever. It’s first-person accounts, but flashbacks aren’t something we go to in every episode.

HR: How hard was it to have all these separate storylines but interlink them.

JB & DD: Pretty hard.

Yeah, it’s a puzzle. You can do an episode that focuses just on one story, but we chose not to do that; at least in these first 11 episodes. You’re always feeling the desire to explore multiple stories. We get the ball rolling pretty quick in the pilot and you don’t want to hit pause on them. It’s a challenge but not an insurmountable one.

The challenge was to keep it deep and not just touch on the surface, so not to undermine individual stories. That’s something we were mindful of and wanted to stay rich with it?

HR: Has the 11 episodes worked in your favor or would you have liked more to explore deeper? Would you have liked the full 22 episode order?

JB & DD: No! Not 22! I was thinking maybe 13, but they tell you pretty early on how many episodes you’re getting and you tailor make the story to that number. I think we could have dealt with one or two more or one less, but…

I think it all had a way of just filling out, weirdly. In retrospect, you look back and think “I don’t know how we did that.” But you know you have 11 episodes and you put all 11 episodes on the board and you try to figure out where the shoes are going to drop throughout the seasons and it all kind of works out. At least, in this case, it did; it doesn’t always. In this case, I feel like it all built…all the stories come to a head in the finale in a way that we feel rhythmically was right on.

Had we been given 15 episodes we would have found ways to make that work, but as it is, everything feels paced just about right.

There was a nice balance and we were able to dig into all of our storylines. It was a lot of fun to break and write. We definitely held back some things that promise a Season 2.

HR: Which is kind of always what you want. You want the answers there, but you want something for a future season.

JB & DD: Yeah, we definitely have that.

HR: Were you involved in the casting? What was that process like, because you have a great bunch of actors.

JB & DD: Casting in pilot season is always hard, because there are 40 other shows casting at the same time. So, it’s a frustrating and chaotic process. The first person we sent the script to was Steve Zahn and he was the first person to say yes, so it happened like that on several roles. We got lucky in finding some terrific actors who felt terrific for the roles and responded to the material.

It all worked out well.

HR: You have such a promising young actress [Bailey Skodje], as well.

JB & DD: Yes, she’s great. Can’t say enough about her.

HR: She gets the mixture of emotions just right.

JB & DD: She really does. I’m amazed by child actors who are really good like that.  I don’t know how they do it.

Yeah, how they achieve that focus is impressive.

The official hashtag for the series will be #TheCrossing and you can use it right now on Twitter. Let the showrunners know your thoughts as the season progresses. This is certain to be one that deserves a second season and more.

Next: ABC midseason schedule full of change

The Crossing premieres on April 2 on ABC.

Are you excited for the new series? What shows do you get the feeling of? Share your thoughts in the comments below.