“So being able to step into the temple of Gibson and smear some mud on the walls, I think, was kind of a breakthrough point holding close to the characters and letting them guide me into the story a little bit.”įellow executive producer Greg Plageman, who took a similar approach when he helmed CBS’s Person of Interest, felt engaged by Smith’s approach. “Obviously, I came in so respectful of Gibson, and my first version of was just trying to just be completely loyal to the book, and it wasn’t really working,” admits Smith. If the series captures even a fraction of the novel’s brain-melting twists and turns, it’s bound to be quite a ride.Īlthough Gibson is perhaps best known for his earlier cyberpunk stories, Smith sought to capture the more contemporary novel’s sympathetic characters to reach beyond a hard sci-fi audience. The Peripheral follows Flynne Fisher ( Chloë Grace Moretz), a woman in a dead-end tech career who uses a strange headset to escape into an otherworldly, futuristic metropolitan London. Smith likely needed every last minute of that time to translate the complex but heartfelt story for the small screen. As a mystery character operating out of a 'peripheral'-a sort of android body that can be inhabited via digital presence-says, the plan is to save 'the world.' It's just that the world isn't their own.Prime Video’s adaptation of William Gibson’s mind-bending 2014 novel, The Peripheral, has been a long time in the making, and showrunner Scott B.

But a new Amazon Prime Video adaptation of the book makes the primary motivation more clear: altruism, of an essentially political nature. Why meddle? The novel is somewhat coy, suggesting a mix of amusement, curiosity, sadism, and even good intentions. Instead, their connection to the pre-Jackpot world creates a 'stub'-a timeline that departs from their own, just a few years into something like our own future-set in a hillbilly enclave on the hard edge of a decaying American society.

In his 2014 novel The Peripheral, science fiction writer William Gibson told the story of a distant future set in the aftermath of a slow-rolling climate-disease-and-politics apocalypse known as the Jackpot, where rich, sad, often vaguely criminal denizens meddle in the affairs of the past.

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