ARMAGEDDON TIME
Scott Z. Burns’ star-studded drama envisions the climate horror to come.
1 THE CAST IS STACKED
With a cast list that includes Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller, Kit Harington, Tobey Maguire, Edward Norton, Gemma Chan, Matthew Rhys, Forest Whitaker, David Schwimmer, Daveed Diggs, Tahar Rahim, Marion Cotillard, Keri Russell, Indira Varma, Cherry Jones and more, Apple TV+ is aiming high with this compelling new drama. Told over eight interconnected episodes, Extrapolations delves into the fate of humanity against the terrifying ticking time bomb of climate change.
2 IT’S A LEARNING EXPERIENCE
With movies including Contagion and An Inconvenient Truth on his CV, Scott Z. Burns is no stranger to the timely topics of global warming and pandemics. ‘I wanted to tell a series of stories that allow you to go on an amazing thrill ride between where we are today and where we might end up,’ explains the writer, director and executive producer of
Extrapolations. ‘I also wanted to look into what we can do to change any of those steps along the way.’
3 THE STORY IS SET IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE
‘I was really excited to work on a project about climate change that takes place during the messy middle because that’s where we are,’ says executive producer Dorothy Fortenberry. ‘This isn’t a story about how it began and this isn’t a story about 300 years in the future. This is a story that is rapidly approaching. It’s happening all around us.’
4 IT’S A GLOBAL EVENT
‘There are eight billion stories we could’ve told, but we wanted to get a lot of different perspectives,’ continues Fortenberry. ‘We wanted to have a real array between the decision makers, the politicians, the climate scientists, the experts, the leaders of nations, the leaders of industry and regular people who just want to make it home to have dinner with their kid at night but they can’t because the subway is flooded. We go all around the world to try and capture how this issue is going to play out.’
5 IT’S THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES
When asked to compare the prescient nature of Contagion to Extrapolations, Burns reveals one large similarity. ‘We did a ton of research on both projects,’ he says. ‘We worked with the best scientists in the world. With Contagion, a pandemic happened to appear six or seven years later – but if you look at pandemic illness, it seems to reoccur in the human record, so we have some understanding that these things repeat themselves. What’s more frightening about this story is we’re doing an experiment with our entire planet that we can do only once. From what I remember about science class, if it’s an experiment you can only do once, then it’s not really an experiment; it’s a bad idea.’
‘We’re doing an experiment with the entire planet that we can do only once’ SCOTT Z. BURNS
EXTRAPOLATIONS RELEASES ON APPLE TV+ ON 17 MARCH.