While social distancing due to COVID-19, the most ubiquitous advice given is to binge-watch — how to immerse yourself mindlessly in cliff hangers, until the pandemic is behind us. Often stuck in an endless loop of episodes on our computer and television screens, we are simultaneously texting or scrolling through social media, only to peek out of our phones, as and when the plot gets gripping. On the surface, Amazon Prime’s latest offering Tales from the Loop, a science fiction drama, appears to be more fodder for that sort of indulgence. But a couple of episodes into the show, you realise there isn’t much happening in terms of twists and turns, nor are our questions being answered, let alone addressed. There is silence, lots of silence. If you had to look out of your phones only for big reveals, there won’t be much left. But there is captivating imagery to savour and visceral emotions to feel.

“Over the years, we expect a mystery or a puzzle to solve, in terms of questions and answers, versus having an emotional experience that might transcend words,” says Nathaniel Halpern, creator, writer and showrunner of Tales from the Loop, over a long-distance phone call from the US. When he set out to adapt Swedish artist, Simon Stålenhag’s wildly successful crowd-funded pictorial book with the same name, he was clear that he wanted to tell an emotional story in the sci-fi genre. Drawing inspiration from Rod Serling’s anthology television series The Twilight Zone (1959), Halpern wanted to make a show with a lot of humanity in it. “In his work, Rod would be critiquing the society but there was also belief in humanity,” observes Halpern. It didn’t take much convincing to get the show green-lit as both Amazon Studios and Fox 21 Television Studios were keen on the idea of an immersive world-building, where sentiments and visuals take precedence. “Certainly it might take adjustment for an audience,” shares Halpern. “My hope is that you get two-three episodes in and realise that the enigmatic quality of the show is like a painting. A painting is not about answers but it’s about feeling.”

Into retrofuturism

Featuring an anthology of eight episodes, the series is a unique adaptation. Stålenhag’s sensorial book contains original paintings, depicting the collusion of a bucolic life in Sweden with technological mysteries and experiments. Each episode in the show is inspired by a painting in the book. “There is really no road map for that kind of a thing,” reveals Halpern. So the process was largely dependent on reacting, emotionally and creatively, to the artworks, and taking cues from Stålenhag’s paintings to build settings and characters. “I’m very much a visual thinker and it’s a visual medium so you should give the audience something worth looking at,” he reasons.

Being as faithful as possible to the book, Halpern often consulted Stålenhag through the creative process. “I would ask him what would this look like. For instance, the character with the bionic arm, what would he look like in this world?” recalls Halpern. In Stålenhag’s book, a world emerges where rusty robots and sinister artefacts are strewn in deep woods and empty landscapes, and technological experiments indicate larger philosophical occurrences. Halpern’s adaptation has the usage of peculiar brutalist architecture, which reminds you of the forgotten socialist structures in Bratislava, where the oddity of the buildings stands out, yet strangely blends in. “Certainly we were taking our cues from Simon’s work and early on when I was talking with Mark Romanek, the director of the pilot, we certainly did talk about brutalist architecture and the retrofuturism of it. It feels like both the past and the future, simultaneously. There is something unique about brutalist architecture.”

World after COVID-19

The coexistence of the past, present and future in the same space is not limited to the look of the show alone, but extends into time. The characters experience time not in a linear fashion, as we know it, but time that loops and doubles back, sometimes never to return. “Time is something I certainly think about a great deal,” reflects Halpern. “Film and television are unique media to explore time because you are creating this artificial time that theatre can’t do.”

In many ways, time seems to come to grinding at the moment, as humanity grapples with an unprecedented modern-day pandemic. “Perhaps people are more self-reflective right now, so they can reflect on time,” says Halpern, who hopes the show’s soothing nature helps the audience calm down and introspect. “I hope it provides some solidarity and comfort to the audience,” he adds. Currently waiting to know whether the show will be renewed for a second season, he is compelled to think what would the audience want at the other side of the pandemic. Once all the binging is done, what would people crave?