The hit sci-fi thriller series Extant is heading to Horror Channel, so we caught up with Mickey Fisher, the writer of the show to find out about the story, having his first show made by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Studios and the writers’ room…

STARBURST: Could you tell us what the premise of Extant is?

Mickey Fisher: The show is about an astronaut named Molly Woods who goes to space on a solo mission she’s up there for a little over a year. When she comes back home, she makes this shocking discovery that somehow, miraculously, she is carrying a child. Her husband John is the designer of this revolutionary, entirely lifelike version of androids he called humanichs, and he has created a child called Ethan, who has become their son. So really the show is about the existence now of these three different life forms; the title Extant is the opposite of extinct and so it really is about all of us vying for survival, now that these three life forms are put into conflict.

Like a survival of the fittest?

Yeah, exactly. What was really interesting when I created the show was there are all these questions about artificial intelligence and lifelike androids, and science fiction has a long, rich history of these kinds of stories. About robots turning on us, and ultimately leading to our destruction. But the story that I wanted to tell is could they ultimately be our salvation and how do we get there? If we’re being threatened by this new entity that attacks us via our physiology, through what makes us human; through our hopes, dreams, and emotions. Then maybe the only thing that’s going to be able to save us is a being that isn’t capable of being manipulated that way because they’re a synthetic being. But in order for them to be invested in our survival, we have to form a connection to them. So that is the story between Molly and her son Ethan throughout the course of the first season and the second season is an evolution of that.

There’s an interesting story on how you got the script made, wasn’t there?

Yeah! I was kind of one of those proverbial 20-year overnight success stories. I actually was going to be an actor. I studied musical theatre the Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. While I was there I started writing. And for the next 20 years after I left college, I was acting in shows and I was writing and making my own films. Writing a tonne of scripts and nothing was quite working, although I just kept at it. Then I eventually moved to Los Angeles when I was in my late 30s. I knew maybe like two people who were working in Hollywood, but nobody that I could really send my scripts to and nobody who could really do anything with it.

So I entered the TrackingB TV Pilot Contest. I had written this pilot for Extant, and I didn’t really know anybody I could send it to, so I thought well maybe if I win this contest, it’ll help get some notoriety. I didn’t win the contest, I was in second place, but the prize is that they try to put it in the hands of people who can do something with the script. I got a call from the guy who runs the contest and he said, ‘You’re going to start getting emails from agents and managers and people like that who are interested in meeting with you’. So I got a call from a manager on Saturday, and he said ‘look I think I can change your life with this script, there are no guarantees because the business is crazy but I think you really have something here’, and then by Monday, he starts sending it around, and my script went viral in Hollywood. About two weeks later, I was signed with this agency WME. And the very next day they said, ‘hey this crazy story about aliens and robots, let’s send it to the guy who does that better than anybody, let’s send it to Steven Spielberg’. And so I was totally freaking out because, again, I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood and the fact that guy might even see my name on a piece of paper on his desk was insane to me. They sent it to Amblin, his company, and they really liked it, so the next thing I heard was, ‘Hey, there’s this filmmaker named Steven Spielberg, and he really liked your script, they want to they want to make the series’. So yeah, I went from not knowing anybody to having a meeting and Amblin Television. And then we brought a showrunner on board, Greg Walker, and he and I developed the pitch more with Amblin, and it went straight to series at CBS. We kind of leapfrogged the whole process that generally happens when you’re making a television show, which is, you go pitch the idea, they have you write the pilot script, they make the pilot, and then they decide if they want to make the series.

We got a call saying that Halle Berry is interested in playing the lead. As if the Spielberg part of it wasn’t crazy enough they’re like ‘hey, Halle Berry thinks this is great’. And at that point, you just say yes!

And you have to be as cool as you can…

Exactly. That is very difficult for me because eight years later, I’m still like a kid in the candy store when I get to meet cool people. I’m still such a fan of movies and television, that when I run into people who make the stuff that I love, I can’t help but be an eight-year-old kid.

Was Spielberg hands-on with the series?

He was very much hands on in that first season, He was very instrumental in helping to shape the design of the show, as well as key casting decisions. When it came to casting the kid, Pierce Gagnon, who played Ethan, the humanichs child, he was very instrumental in that. Gagnan had been in the movie Looper, and when he came in he was the character that I had envisioned.

There’s a day Steven came to the set, when we were shooting the pilot, which was super fun, and we were shooting at Culver Studios, which doesn’t even exist anymore they’ve torn it down, but the stage we were shooting on. We’re shooting our pilot we have all of our key, oh sorry, It’s my dogs go crazy. We built a lot of our standing sets there, we built the main house and built the space station stuff. So when Mr Spielberg came to visit, we were all standing around talking to him and Steven’s looking around, he’s like ‘yeah this is the stage where we shot E.T., the spaceship was like right over there’. So we had a bit of that providence in that we were actually shooting on the stages where he dropped some excellent stuff.

So were you on set for the whole shoot?

I was on set for a lot of it. I wrote four episodes that first season, and as you know, it was my first job in television, so during the course of the pilot, I was on set with the showrunner for most of that. I was on set to produce my episodes, and I spent a lot of time on set for the finale of the first season that I wrote. It was directed by a guy named Miguel Sapochnik, who directed a tonne of the huge Game of Thrones episodes. I only wrote two episodes in the second season and I spent a little less time on set then, but I would still go over there just to be part of it and hang around and see what the cast and crew were doing and also because I think, for the crew, it’s kind of nice to you know to be there to say thank you to the people who are making the show happen on a day to day basis.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan joins the cast in Season Two

Did you feel a bit possessive of the product that you’d created, and see others come to write for it?

I was in the writers’ room when I wasn’t on set helping to fashion those stories, and giving input and curating. The fact is TV production is very much a village kind of effort. It’s incredibly collaborative because the way the production works is when somebody is writing an episode, there’s another episode in production, and there’s another episode that’s in post-production. And so there are all these different episodes in different stages – all these plates in the air. You really need this huge team of people to make it happen. One of the first things I had to learn coming in was to let go of things a bit. Unless you’re a super control freak, you really can’t control every part of the process and so it was a little difficult at times not to go, ‘I wouldn’t necessarily write it like that’. I have to give this writer their space in their room to make it their own if the show is going to be a success. There are writers who have very different life experiences than I have, and they’re going to bring something very different to it, and the show is going to be better for that. And so I tried to remind myself of that as often as possible.

Was writing for TV much different than writing a film for yourself?

One of the first things I learnt is that TV is very much like an office job, it’s like office hours, 9.30 to 5.30. You’re in a room with seven or eight other people if you’re a drama or maybe if you’re in a comedy room that can be much larger. And you’re just talking about the story, all day long, talking about the characters, and it’s really fun but mentally exhausting. Then at a certain point, you know you’re all coming up with the story together and at a certain point, a writer takes that episode and then they’ll write an outline and then they’ll go write the script. And then there’s a lot of rounds of revision between the studio and the network and then you get to the cast and the producers. And so it’s very much like a team sport.

I think writing a film – I have yet to have a film that’s actually produced yet out here, but I’ve made my own – is a bit more solitary. It’s what I do out here in my office right now when I’m not on a show. So when I’m out here, it’s just me and the dog, and I’m left to my own devices. That can be great sometimes but also there are plenty of times when I get stuck where I wish I had seven other really smart people that I could turn to them and go ‘what should I do here?’ [laughs].

Extant is coming to Horror Channel in the UK, which will be the first time it’s been on a free-to-air channel over here, how does that feel?

I’m thrilled! I was so excited when I got the email about this because, Extant is still alive out there in the world and people are still watching it. The nature of this business is that you make these things, and then they exist for a period of time and you move on, and the fact that they exist now on certain streaming platforms and stuff like that is great, but it’s still not accessible to everybody. And so the fact that it’s airing there and that it’s accessible to everybody is really exciting and I love the fact that there may be young people who are going to tune into it for the first time who’d never even heard about it the first time around, and that will be an all-new story to them.

Finally, what’s next for you?

Right now I’m working on a pilot for Netflix. I’m the showrunner and co-creating a pilot for it. It’s an adaptation of a novel called Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley. It’s being produced by the Obama’s production company Higher Ground. We’re just now in the pilot writing phase, so I’m doing that, and then working on some new pitches and trying to get the next ball up the hill!

Extant begins on Horror Channel on May 11th and screens weeknights at 8pm.

Tune in on Sky 317, Virgin 149, Freeview 68, Freesat 138.