It’s also highly personal for Gibson, drawn from his childhood memories of Wytheville, the southwest Virginia town where he first devoured science fiction as a boy in the mid-1950s. In “The Peripheral,” great leaps in time and technology are latched to a locale that feels utterly familiar, a place where nothing and everything has changed. that operates by handprint, there’s little about Clanton in 2032 that looks much different than it might in the semirural South of the present day. Save for the 3-D printing shop and the beat-up A.T.M. That sweet spot had a lot do to with the setting, much of which is confined to the fictional town of Clanton, N.C. “It happened to be a book by the most illustrious sci-fi author, but the pitch itself when talking to the studio was about the humanity of the characters, and I think that’s where we hit the sweet spot.” “We ended up pitching it like, ‘It’s basically like “Friday Night Lights” with a time machine,’” Joy said. “Our world is in many not very subtle ways, but in some surprisingly subtle ways, really transforming underneath us.”īut can this new time-traveling story, Joy and Nolan’s first completed TV production together since “Westworld” began in 2016, avoid some of the pitfalls of that series, which was criticized in later seasons for getting too bogged down in complications and multiple timelines? When Nolan and Joy first tried to sell the idea of turning “The Peripheral” into a series, they, like Gibson, tried to keep it relatively grounded. “It feels like a common thread between Gibson and Crichton,” Nolan said in a joint video interview with Joy, who is also his wife, and the director and executive producer Vincenzo Natali.

As the creators and showrunners of HBO’s “Westworld,” based on the original film and screenplay by Michael Crichton, they were no strangers to sci-fi that barters in slippery notions of reality. Perhaps as important, it had as executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, whose production company, Kilter Films, developed the series through Amazon Studios. Smith (“A Simple Plan”), who created and oversaw the series - his first time as a series showrunner. “The Peripheral,” however, had the aid of Amazon’s deep pockets and of another acclaimed novelist, Scott B.

Reality is a loaded term in Gibson’s writing, which has made his stories notoriously difficult to adapt - his debut novel from 1984, “Neuromancer,” has alone seen multiple failed attempts.

The Peripheral by William Gibson