‘Counterpart’ team explores butterfly effect in Starz show
What if you were a grown adult working a seemingly mundane bureaucratic job, caring for your comatose wife, and you learned that there existed not only another version of yourself but of the whole world? Suddenly questions of true self, identity, and nature vs. nurture would permeate even the simplest everyday interactions. At least, that is what happens to Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) in Starz’s new drama “Counterpart” (debuting Jan. 21), a series designed around the “nostalgia of a classic spy novel with a science fiction element sprinkled over it,” per creator and executive producer Justin Marks.
Inspired by his childhood reading of John le Carre and Graham Greene, Marks deconstructed the “tropes, conventions and language” of the thriller genre as the landscape on which to build a characterdriven show that explores multiple versions of its characters in its two worlds — worlds that started out similar but whose history diverged, resulting in different advancements in technology and different behaviors in its version of the people from Howard’s world.
Howard learns about the existence of the other version of himself (called Howard Prime in the show and also played by Simmons) early in the premiere episode, driving the questions of identity and nature vs. nurture that executive producer Jordan Horowitz says are at the crux of the show.
“The answer to ‘why are there two sides?’ is where a hard science fiction show would drive because it is a big concept, but the human element inside of it and the implications of it existing was always more compelling to us. ‘OK, so it exists, but where do we go next?’ ” Horowitz says. “Resources were allocated in different places, and we may be genetically identical, but because of our circumstance, one aspect of our personality was developed, and another was repressed.”
Just as the worlds appear different, so do the Howards — simply by the way in which they carry themselves, which allows Simmons to tap into different tools to embody each individual man. He relied solely on their psychologies and emotions to set them apart.
“It just became a question of how life has beaten down or attacked these characters in different ways and how it’s sort of empowered them in different ways,” he says.
Although both versions of Howard were born of the same genetics and had the same experiences for the first few decades of their lives, the last several decades, when their worlds’ histories diverged, is where they began to “peel off ” from each other.
As time goes on, though, Simmons reveals that the Howards find “how similar they actually are” at their core, despite the different circumstances that have led them to very different behaviors and personality traits. “Every new piece of information Howard gets is elucidating and mindblowing,” Simmons says. “There can’t help but be a butterfly effect to his learning new information and being changed by it.”