The passage
Season 1 | US Fox, 14 Jan | UK Fox, TBC
Based on novelist Justin Cronin’s trilogy, the Passage television series remixes the first book to create a clearer throughline. Showrunner Liz Heldens, who is an admitted super-fan of Cronin’s books, says the first season revolves around Project NOAH, and finding a little girl, Amy Belafonte (Saniyya Sidney), who might be the key to creating a vaccination against a humanitykilling infectious disease. “The reason the beginning of the show is different [from the book] was to give everyone in the show a credible point of view,” Heldens explains. “There’s a pandemic coming. There’s a huge emergency. They need this little girl to get the vaccine ready so they’re doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. That was an effort to make sure all the characters had nuance, and you could understand why everybody was doing what they’re doing. So, we’re just slowing down the story a bit so that you understand that the first season of this show is about the good intentions, and bad decisions, that lead to the end of the world as we know it.”