EXCLUSIVE: The creator of Prime Video‘s The Rig has detailed how he wanted to strike a balance between penning an entertaining drama and tackling existential debates around climate change.
David Macpherson has expanded the second season of the UK hit beyond the confines of Season 1’s oil rig, which he described as akin to Alien and its expansion for sequel Aliens in the 1980s.
The series from the former environmental policy worker tackles numerous themes and looks to the harm our planet is experiencing today, but Macpherson stressed that he is cognisant of the need to entertain.
“Our show is at heart a big piece of entertainment and being entertaining should come first,” he told Deadline. “It’s not about telling people what to think it’s about asking questions and opening up debates.”
While he said that TV creators don’t necessarily have a “responsibility to educate,” he countered that shows “need to have something to say and be bigger than the characters and stories themselves.” “If you are not doing that then what are you doing?,” posited the Scottish scribe.
The first season of supernatural thriller The Rig, which was one of Amazon UK’s debut commissions, ended with the rescued crew watching as a tsunami destroyed the rig and headed towards the shore, presumably wiping out the coastline. Season 2 expands the precinct to an Arctic glacier. It begins with helicopters taking the survivors of the Kinloch Bravo to a new secret offshore facility called the Stac. Here, the trapped crew must deal with the emotional and physical fallout of the devastating tsunami that destroyed the Bravo, and contend with swirling conspiracies, corporate conflicts, and new threats from the dark depths of the world’s ocean. New cast Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Alice Krige have jumped aboard Season 2 alongside the likes of Schitt’s Creek star Emily Hampshire, Martin Compston and Iain Glen.
“I wanted to open up the show, do some world building and take the team to a number of different places,” added Macpherson. “Everything in the oil industry is big and I wanted to show that ambition. I saw it as a bit like Alien and Aliens, where our first one is very contained and this one is much more action orientated.”
The expansion was helped along by Line of Duty director John Strickland, who joined Season 2 and brought a “focus on story and character” along with being “very very good on the technical side of things,” according to Derek Wax, who runs Banijay-backed The Rig producer Wild Mercury Productions.
“I see things from all sides”
The Rig
Macpherson is also penning New Pictures’ adaptation of Geoff Dembicki’s The Petroleum Papers. His focus and knowhow on the environment is drawn from multiple places, including a former role as a climate policy advisor to a non-profit, a job woking for the Scottish government and his father being an oil worker.
“So I see things from all sides,” he said.
He added that oil workers aren’t the anti-environmentalists they are sometimes made out to be. “From the outside there is this stereotype that the men and women who do the job are full of contradictions but that is not true. Often they are just trapped in industries that are the only option for people from a certain part of the world.”
Much like The Responder creator Tony Schumacher, who used to be a policeman, or former doctor and RAF officer Jed Mercurio, Macpherson has come to TV writing later in life. This, he said, has given him a “wide hinterland of subjects I know about,” and he called on others to try a different career before turning to writing.
“I really think having those life experiences helped me a lot,” he added.
Wax, who produced BAFTA-winning BBC drama The Sixth Commandment, praised Amazon UK commissioners for taking a chance on Macpherson at a time when they were still ironing out the streamer’s strategy.
“Commissioners are often interested in writers with a very long track record but picking David was a bold thing to do,” he added. “They backed a relatively unknown writer and developed a show with us that had no casting attached at all but were greenlighting based on the strength of the script.”
Had they been pitched the show this year, Wax posited that Amazon may not have taken such a gamble given “the market has contracted and streaming boom has curtailed.”
Wax was “overwhelmed” by the response to Season 1, which he said hit the tpoop-five Amazon charts in numerous countries and, crucially, had a high completion rate.
Since it aired, Macpherson said he has had messages of support from South Korea, Germany and Australia. “We had people from the oil industry get in touch, particularly women, who were so happy at seeing themselves represented on screen,” he added.
The Rig Season 2 launches on Prime Video globally on January 2.
