How Starz’s Counterpart, Led by J.K. Simmons, Thrillingly Tests the Viewer’s Trust
Photo: Starz
By its very title, Counterpart may be telling us that it’s lying to us.
The new Starz series is quite literally a story of counterparts, in that it stars Oscar winner J.K. Simmons as two perceivable branches of one man living in Berlin. Specifically, these are two people who were once were one man, named Howard—but whose lives have been running in parallel since a curious incident some 30 years ago caused a split in human existence that gave everyone a clone who lives in a world that runs in conjunction with ours but with some significant differences. (It’s a diversion about which only a few high-ranking officials on either side actually know.) Not surprisingly, and quite amusingly, the Howards are not fast friends after they meet.
But Counterpart, which was created by The Jungle Book writer Justin Marks and counts infamously not-Oscar-winning producer Jordan Horowitz as an executive producer, is also the sum of many parts: It’s a tale of espionage, science fiction, a government coverup and a manhunt for an assassin all rolled into one impeccably thorough thought experiment on inevitability and fate. Is there another version of you out there somewhere who buys the same clothes, prefers the same cocktails and marries the same spouse? Due to the circumstances of his or her world, does this other you also end up in a career path where an expertise in semi-automatic weaponry and a knowledge of bureaucratic leaks is par for the course? (To delineate between the two men, it’s probably best to refer to Simmons’ weakling pencil pusher as Howard Silk, and his not-to-be-fucked-with muscle as Howard Prime.)
“It was always our intention to make it a show about identity, about an exploration of self and nature versus nurture and who we are and why we are the way we are,” Horowitz told Paste late last year, during the series’ Los Angeles press day. “The question we always need to ask is, ‘What does the audience need to know and what’s the least amount we can do to let them know that?’ We never really wanted to get hung up on the believability or the unbelievability of a concept. It was a sort of knocking it once like a bell early on and letting it ring out.”
Marks says his formative years, spent reading John Le Carré and Graham Greene, served as training ground for the world of Counterpart: “I wanted to give it my own spin.”
And that they did.
Horowitz and Marks are friends since childhood who reconnected as adults in Los Angeles when the latter ran in front of the former’s car while running late for a dentist appointment. (Fun fact: They were in a band together in high school called The Side Projects, playing what Horowitz describes as “Dave Matthews-ish” music befitting their backgrounds as “white kids in Scarsdale in the ‘90s.”) And Marks says Counterpart has been percolating for about eight years.
Eventually, Simmons signed on to star and The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum agreed to do the pilot. A writers’ room was established after Starz guaranteed a two-season order, the group subsequently amassing a show bible that, as Marks joked to journalists during the show’s Television Critics Association panel earlier this month, reads “like a giant, hundred-page long set of stereo instructions” to anyone who isn’t on staff.
When I asked Marks last year if the Berlin setting was too on the nose, he didn’t blink. From an allegorical standpoint, he argues, “We took the Berlin Wall and made a sort of metaphysical construct.” Architecturally, the German capital works for the show’s theme because it’s loaded with a mix of old and new world designs—although the credit for melding a good deal of that into the minutiae of Counterpart’s aesthetic has to go to production designer Dan Bishop ( Mad Men) and others in his department.
Plus, practically speaking, Marks says, the show needed a place that would be welcoming to film crews but also one that—considering the actual events of the past century—would be a believable place for a bunch of recently unemployed Reagan-era spies to go to be “recruited to apply all of their skill sets to a new kind of Cold War.”
Simmons, who rose to television prominence via the grizzly HBO prison drama Oz, told me when we spoke last year that he wasn’t exactly looking for a series regular gig after his Oscar win for Whiplash in 2015. But he was drawn to the enticing idea of playing both sides of the character coin.