Murderbot creators, writers, directors, and executive producers Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz had well-established source material when it came to adapting their new series for Apple TV+. Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books, starting with the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novella All Systems Red, craft a specific world and an even more specific character: a self-aware Security Unit that’s both heavily armed and deeply sarcastic.
Of course, it (mostly) only shoots when necessary—including when things heat up in Murderbot‘s plot—and the majority of its snarky taunts go unheard by anyone but the audience as part of the character’s inner monologue. Even still, the 10-episode show is very much both a comedy and a thriller, a balance of tones the Weitzes aimed to keep consistent without making it feel forced.
“I think it’s really hard to have it constantly in mind,” Chris Weitz told io9 at a recent Murderbot press day. “You’ve just got this kind of tuning fork of tone in your mind, and things either fit or they don’t. You don’t want the threat to ever become goofy, and you don’t want the humor to ever undermine the stakes of what’s going on.”
He continued. “Some of that takes place in the editing room. A lot of it can actually be addressed in terms of when you’re doing the CGI, just in terms the veracity of the things that you’re portraying. Like when there’s a hostile monster attacking, how to not make it look goofy, how to make sure it feels like it exists in physical space. So then, when you do make a turn from one aspect of tone to another, from a thriller to comedy, just having a good ear for when it clangs and when it doesn’t.”
The length of each episode—most Murderbot entries are around 25 minutes—also helped, according to Paul Weitz. “It’s really beneficial to have this be a half-hour show as opposed to an hour show, in terms of the tension,” he said. “We did want it to have tension throughout the show, and that would have been a lot harder if we were trying to pad stuff into an hour, [since] almost all sci-fi [shows are] an hour long.”
Accorted to the Weitzes, author Wells took an active role in shaping the series; she’s credited as a consulting producer. Also crucial: star Alexander Skarsgård, who’s also one of the show’s executive producers.
“If an actor is going to agree to do a show, it’s going to take a substantial amount of time out of their creative lives,” Paul Weitz said. “I think for us, the really big thing in a way was—aside from the things that Alexander brought to it, where he has a really quirky sense of humor that juxtaposes against what he looks like, what his physicality is—I think that Alexander really wants to erase the distance between himself and the world and wants to believe the character exists. So he kind of wouldn’t let us get away with anything.”
Bringing the show to the screen was very much a collaboration, Weitz explained. “We had two big collaborators, one of whom was Martha Wells. If we were adding something—because we didn’t take anything out of the book, basically, but we did add some stuff in order to make 10 episodes—she was available to us to bounce ideas off of, to read scripts, to give us ideas if she didn’t like the ideas that we were having. So that was our first big collaborator.”
He continued. “And then Alex was our next big collaborator because he’s very literal, almost in a Murderbot fashion. He doesn’t want to just have something happening because that’s a cool thing to be happening in the plot. He wants to know why something’s happening.”
The first two episodes of Murderbot arrive May 16 on Apple TV+.
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