Until only a few weeks ago, the new TV series “American Odyssey” was simply called “Odyssey” — a modern day play on Homer. Just as people assumed Odysseus died in the epic poem, in the NBC drama the same assumptions are made about an American soldier (Anna Friel) who is captured and presumed killed in Western Africa.
“American Odyssey” tells the vast story of a global conspiracy that reaches deep into Wall Street and Washington, and the development of the show itself could be told as a “vast story.” It was in the making for 3-and-a-half years before it made its premiere Sunday night on NBC.
When co-creators Adam Armus and Kay Foster came by The Frame recently, we asked them about recent changes in television programming, the history of their female protagonist and some of the criticism directed towards the show's portrayal of the Muslim world.
Interview Highlights:
Is it typical for a show to be in development for three-and-a-half years?
Adam: It's not typical at all. Generally speaking, the pilot seasons lasts for about three months, and by the end of those three months you know if you're going on the air, and a few months after that you're doing your pilot and you're making your series. For us, it was a series of, "We love this script, but it's so risky. Can NBC do this?" And we said, "Of course!" [laughs] But for NBC, it took a little while for them to get on board.
What happened in the larger universe of television that made "American Odyssey" less of a risky idea?
Adam: For a long time, television was under the impression that you had to dumb things down for the audience. But with the advent of cable television, especially premium cable, I think people are realizing that people want sophisticated television as well. With the success of shows like "Homeland," "Breaking Bad" or "The Sopranos," those shows were groundbreaking in that they told rich stories with complex characters, so NBC said, "We have to get into that business."
The character that's arguably the lead character is played by Anna Friel. From the beginning of this story, was your protagonist a woman?
Kay: That's such an interesting question, because we wish we could take credit for that, but we really can't. We took the idea of doing a modern-day telling of "The Odyssey" by Homer to Russell Rothberg at the studio, and we said that we wanted to write something on spec. And Russell said, "Why don't you make it a woman?" We said, "Wow! That's kind of cool." It opened it up for us, and we looked into females in the service and found this soldier, which is a female engagement team soldier who actually goes along with the special forces troops and helps manage the women in areas where—
Adam: There are language and cultural issues. A lot of our soldiers are working in the Middle East and North Africa right now, and in those areas Muslim women don't approach men at all. So our special forces needed to figure out how to engage with these people if they wouldn't engage with us. They brought women along, and these women were brought into very, very hostile areas, they had to learn to fight the way special forces fight, and Friel's character is a linguist — she knows Arabic and she speaks Arabic throughout our series — and she's the one who reached out to the locals.
The reviews have been split a little bit on the way the Arab world is depicted. One review from our partners at Vulture.com reads, "The symmetry represents a particular, very popular American worldview, granted (see Fox News's reduction of the former Ottoman Empire to basically Muslim Mad Max), but it's an exhaustively cartoonish one." How do you approach depicting the Arab world, and how do you react to that kind of criticism?
Kay: I don't really have a reaction to the criticism specifically. We come from our own point of view and we tried to be as fair-handed as we could. We also depict bad people who are American, bad corporations who are America. I don't think we saw the world as black and white at all; we have some very lovely characters who are Muslim and a great respect for Muslim culture and people.
Adam: I think if you just watch the pilot of our show, you may come out of it feeling like, "Well, they sort of treat the Muslims like we all do, like they're all terrorists," or something like that. First thing is that that's not true, because we meet Aslam, who's a 14-year-old, independent thinker. Second of all, as you watch our series you're going to meet many Muslim characters who come from all different perspectives. Some are freedom fighters, some are terrorists. We have one character who turns out to be Aslam's uncle, who is a transvestite with a talk show in Bamako, Mali. We have characters from every aspect of the culture, and we're actually quite proud of that.