The Ark Showrunners Devlin & Glassner on S02 Renewal, Development

The Ark showrunners Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner have a combined 60 years of experience between them. As both worked in all different genres, both are synonymous with the Stargate franchise, with Devlin writing the 1994 original film with director Roland Emmerich and Glassner developing SG-1 with Brad Wright as a TV series. Coincidentally, both would work together on The CW’s The Outpost before developing the space science fiction thriller The Ark. With SYFY renewing the series for a second season, Devlin and Glassner spoke to Bleeding Cool about their reaction, SYFY’s commitment, if they originally planned a self-enclosed the first season or make it open-ended with an eye to the future, series inspiration, and teases what to expect in the future. The series follows the adventures of the crew of the spaceship Ark One, who are among the final survivors of humanity, as they must become the best versions of themselves to stay on course and survive after experiencing a catastrophic event that caused massive destruction and loss of life. The season finale has the crew facing an uncertain future as they deal with the dangerous crew of Ark 15.

How Dean Devlin & Jonathan Glassner Developed ‘The Ark’

Bleeding Cool: How do you guys feel about ‘The Ark’ getting renewed for a second season?

Devlin: We’re very depressed.

Glassner: It’s bumming us out [Both laugh]. We’re very excited. It’s going to be a blast. We were already thinking about what we were going to do, so now we get to do it.

Devlin: We get to go back into space. How cool is that?!

When a series such as this gets greenlit, do you typically plan to have the first season become a standalone, or do you leave things more open-ended with an ending and tease for the next season (assuming you have that second season)?

I’ve done that in the past, where we just do a complete season and then find out. Jonathan and I had a lot of confidence. We had a lot of confidence that [The Ark] was going to continue, and we had unprecedented support from SYFY Channel. They were amazing through this, inventive in how they were marketing, promoting it, and building community. We had a lot of confidence. The thing that we talked about was, “Let’s have a finale where you feel like it’s a complete season, where you finish a story.” It’s a complete meal, but let’s also tease that we got more story to tell.

Can you break down the development of the series?

The thing is, there are a lot of different kinds of science fiction today. There are more sci-fi shows now than ever. For the most part, they tend to be grounded, dark, and edgy shows that slowly tell you a story over a long period. We talked about the kinds of shows we fell in love with growing up, the kind that made us want to do sci-fi. Our thing from the beginning was to write a love letter to every show we ever liked and to honor it. We’re trying to do a show that’s a bit of a throwback that is not made often anymore. We plotted where we wanted to take this thing. We got excited about the twists and turns that we wanted to do, but then we stayed open to see what the actors were bringing to the table, and then we tried to incorporate that into this larger vision.

Did it feel like a clean slate, or was it hard not to draw on things you did before, like ‘Stargate?’

Glassner: Luckily, they’re very different shows, and ‘Stargate’ can travel to different planets, civilizations, and aliens. [The Ark] does not do that. We don’t do aliens. We don’t come across other communities other than human ones. It’s a whole different kind of storytelling. This is more of a tale of survival than as opposed to a mission.

Devlin: All of these shows exist because you’re standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before you. There’s no ‘Star Wars’ without ‘Flash Gordon,’ and there’s no ‘The Ark’ without ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Silent Running’ (1972). One of the great things is that you get a shortcut, like for instance, in the opening of the pilot, we see them all waking up out of these sleeper chambers. There’s no long explanation to the audience of what a sleeper chamber is or what cryogenics are. There’s this assumption that if you like sci-fi and you’re watching the show, you probably saw them wake up in those things in ‘Alien’ (1979) or ‘Passengers’ (2016). It gives us a shortcut to get into the story. At the same time, you’re trying to do something original. It’s using the language of those who came before you and then trying to use it in a new way. We’re kind of like rappers [laughs]. We’re taking samples, and we’re making new music.

Glassner: That’s it, I quit. [Devlin laughs].

Were there figures from your lives or just maybe from your life or fiction that helped inspire you to build the characters? I feel William Trust [Paul Leonard Murray] has that billionaire conglomerate Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk-type feel on there. Can you speak of some of the development of the characters?

Glassner: You nailed it on him. He is based on those people and little Steve Jobs. Our ships are built by billionaires, not by the government. As a result, they don’t have any regulations about how to build it or any rules, like “you have to put alarms on this door” and “you have to put smoke detectors in here” [laughs] None of that’s in there. That’s where they came from. The other people started as archetypes, right?

Devlin: In the pilot, one of the things that we wanted to do, because I knew where Jonathan was going, and so I thought, “Let me present these characters as though you’ve seen these guys a million times on a million other shows, so you know everything about them.” You make all these assumptions, and then hopefully, by episode three, we’ve taken them in a direction you didn’t see coming. Our mantra on the show is “The only thing expected is the unexpected.” We want this to constantly go places you don’t see coming, but to do that, you have to set up an anticipation of where you think it’s going, and then you can take it in a new direction.

Since it’s season one and there’s still a lot to be built here with the Arc 15, I’m guessing as the seasons go, we’re going to find out more similar ships within ‘The Ark’ realm. Are we going to shift to where the Ark One does its exploring, or are we going to stay more survival and deal with internal strife and crisis?

Glassner: We will eventually get to some planets. It’s not ever going to become a colonizing show, at least not this one. It could be a spinoff that does, but it’s about the journey, not about the arrival.

The season one finale of The Ark, which stars also stars Christie Burke, Reece Ritchie, Richard Fleeshman, Stacey Read, Ryan Adams, Pavle Jerinic, Shalini Peiris, Christina Wolfe, Tiana Upcheva, and Jelena Moore, airs tonight on SYFY and later available to stream on Peacock.