The Bombmaker: Manhattan Creator/Showrunner Sam Shaw on His Show’s Explosive Second Season

TV Features

One of 2014’s biggest surprises was WGN’s Manhattan. Set at the height of World War II in the remote desert town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the series centers on the scientific team involved in what would later become publicly known as the Manhattan Project. Beyond merely tracking the construction of the original weapon of mass destruction, the show also explores the psychological toll this mission put on its contributors as well as their families, many of whom were left completely in the dark, lest one wrong move resulted in an accusation of treason. Creator/showrunner Sam Shaw (Masters of Sex) admits he was an unlikely person to tell this tale. An aspiring novelist for most of his life, Shaw confesses to having very little affinity for either history or physics growing up. Indeed, his original iteration of the show focused on the modern-day War on Terror. That is, until a single sentence re-shaped his entire conception of the show.

On the eve of Manhattan’s second season, Paste sat down with Shaw for an extensive conversation on his own trajectory from novelist to television showrunner, the glory of actor Daniel Stern’s facial hair and how the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may very well be only the beginning of his show’s story.

Paste Magazine: I read originally that this started out as a script on the War on Terror, which at first sounds odd but then when you really think, it kind of makes a lot of sense. How did that story pivot to the Manhattan Project?
Sam Shaw: There were a couple of things. It started as a piece of writing that, as you say, was very contemporary and was going to be about the burdens of secrecy and the secret work of people who were dealing with issues of national security and all those ethical dilemmas—what it’s like to be in the vice grips of serious ethical problems and not have all of the emotional coping mechanisms you’d regularly have at your disposal. What is it to be wrestling with moral issues involving national security and freedom when you can’t go home and talk with your wife, or husband, or children about it? It became clear to me that it was going to be hard to write about those issues with any kind of moral or historical objectivity. For one thing, the story isn’t over yet. I have a really good friend who is a brilliant writer who wrote Spotlight about issues of sex abuse in the Catholic Church and, before that, he made this movie about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. I know that one thing that was incredibly complicated about that enterprise, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it from afar, was that the story was ongoing. You pick up the newspaper and there would be some new event. For a whole bunch of reasons, I decided to try to find another way to write about the same set of questions or issues.

Then, I stumbled across one sentence in a book. It was a book about government secrecy in the United States and there was a line, almost an aside, that articulated one of the most basic facts about the Manhattan Project—of all the people who lived in Los Alamos during the years 1943-1945, the vast majority of them had no idea what the purpose of the city was until the day they turned on their radios and discovered that this city in Japan had ceased to exist in a fraction of a second. That was what really fascinated me. It was a footnote in some other research and it led me down a rabbit hole.

Paste: Prior to diving in, was the Manhattan Project an interest of yours or was it a matter of, “Now I have to hit the library for research?”
Shaw: It was basically a full-immersion baptism. I knew the headlines, as most people do. First, a few disclaimers, I am the furthest thing from a scientist. I took and did not conduct myself well all that admirably in a couple physics courses in high school, and one in college. I thought it was interesting, but I didn’t see the romance in it, which I do now. I wasn’t a history guy either. I was an English major. I was a book nerd. I wanted to be a fiction writer for most of my life. So I knew the broad strokes—I knew we built a bomb, I know we were first, but that was it. I didn’t really know about the culture of secrecy that surrounded it and I didn’t really understand the extent to which that moment—when we invented the apocalypse, basically—was also the moment that contemporary America was born. We reoriented America’s status in the world forever. Everything shifted, which is such a fascinating thing. For the people who were in Los Alamos, the stakes couldn’t possibly have felt higher. They legitimately believed the future of Western Civilization hung in the balance. If Hitler got a bomb, that was the endgame. The irony to me is that—of course, we succeeded and we won the war—but the America that ended up on the other side of that equation wasn’t exactly the America we were trying to preserve in the first place. We’d become something else.

Paste: In your mind was it always going to be focusing primary on fictional characters, or was there ever a version where you incorporated more real-life people?
Shaw: Almost from the very beginning, it seemed really clear to me that the show had to be built around invented characters. It’s not a docu-drama and I didn’t really want it to be a docu-drama. By the way, there’s incredible nonfiction that tells the story of the Manhattan Project. I have a library of them in my house, much to my wife’s chagrin (laughs). There are incredible films too, brilliant documentaries—The Day After Trinity is obviously the most famous. It seemed to me that if we were shackled to the biographies of a few real historical figures, we wouldn’t have the latitude to tell a story that had the kind of emotional impact that I wanted the story to have. And I will say, there will never be, for example, a fictional representation of Richard Feynman that will ever be as fascinating as the actual Richard Feynman. So if people want to know about Richard Feynman, for God’s sake, do so!

Paste: When you were writing the script did you have any reference points? Obviously it’s historical fiction, but did you have any films or TV shows in minds in terms of, ‘I want to capture that kind of tone?’
Shaw: In terms of the relationship of fact to history, there were some models. I talked with Tommy Schlamme, our executive producer and director, in the early days about E.L. Doctorow, and Ragtime, and World’s Fair and this approach of sketching a historical moment where real historical figures rub elbows with fictional characters. There’s a great tradition of doing that in literature. It also seemed clear to me that, to the extent that we’re telling a true story, there had to be some real historical figures that would appear. You can’t tell a story about the Manhattan Project without Oppenheimer. On the other hand, I was a little more interested in the stories of some of the people who generally appear in the margins of the stories we tell about the Manhattan Project—women who were there, junior scientists and what it was to be part of the everyday fabric of this place.

Tonally, the biggest thing for me was that the history was really fucking weird. I think when we talk about WWII and the Greatest Generation, we fall into this this Vaseline-lensed idea of what that moment was and what it felt like. The truth is that it was an incredibly peculiar moment. Just think about the broad outline of the story—you have this secret city full of the world’s greatest geniuses building this apocalyptic weapon. It sounds like a Ridley Scott movie. And not The Martian, it sounds like Alien. It felt really important to me to capture this feeling of unease—this paranoia, of the sort of Twilight Zone aspect of life in that place. Those were a lot of the aesthetic references that I was looking at. I think there’s some DNA in the story of the atomic bomb, which, in its own way, is like Blue Velvet. It’s one of those great American suburban stories—the dark secret behind picket fences. There’s a sense of macabre and strangeness of Errol Morris, who is a hero of mine and that was also a tonal reference. Then of course there are others. Tommy Schlamme worked with me on the show and I worship at the altar of The West Wing. I cast a wide net.

Paste: Obviously, you guys don’t have to be experts in physics, but I’m sure you have to have some kind of working knowledge of it. But then you have to forget entire swaths of that knowledge because this is set 70 years ago.
Shaw: That’s exactly right, which is so counter-intuitive! It’s like reaching over with your right hand to scratch the left side of your face (laughs). For me, and the rest of the writers, we took a crash course in physics. We did all we could to immerse ourselves in the science and physics, so we could be conversant enough to write about it credibly and have our physicists sound like physicists. I should also stop here to say we have consultants who are not only incredibly helpful but also mission-critical for us. They keep us honest and they’re very patient. But, of course, then we have to forget not only about the ensuing 70 years of physics history, but history in general—the outcome of the war and all of the aspects of the story that now seem historically inevitable were actually huge contingencies at the time. In many ways, it’s a form of autohypnosis or selective amnesia to sit down and write the characters.

Paste: In terms of the characters, the star of the show is so clearly Daniel Stern’s beard.
Shaw: Not just the star of the show, he’s the star of my creative life as a writer of the show! That beard’s like our spirit animal! By the way, entirely real and entirely Daniel’s. It also predated Manhattan. He showed up to this meeting we had and read for the part. It was this incredible thing—a cross between a Founding Father and a Talmudic scholar and a mountain goat. It’s unbelievable.

Paste: You populated the show with a lot of character actors that people may have seen before, but they aren’t household names and don’t bring a lot of baggage in terms of past roles. Was that intentional?
Shaw: When doing a period show, it’s helpful when an audience can come to the story without a whole bunch of baggage in terms of past ideas of who the actors are, or what roles they play. There’s a curious exception to that, which is William Petersen who joined our cast this year. He belongs on the Mount Rushmore of television because he was at the center of CSI, one of the most successful shows in history. In an odd way, that stature he has as a familiar television face is actually helpful to us in playing this role, because he has this commanding authority when you see him. But, yes, I do think it’s helpful if audiences can just see the characters unhindered by any past associations when they look at the actors. Also—I will go to the bat for this—I don’t think there’s a better ensemble cast anywhere on television. The caliber of the actors who are on our show is so breathtaking. It’s a great credit to our cast director, Jeanie Bacharach, who did beautiful work. Also, it’s a credit to our network. They’re a new network and could have easily said to us, “We need someone who’s a giant marquee name to come in and play this role.” Instead what they said was, “Go find the most brilliant bunch of actors you can find.”

Paste: For me, the key line of the first year was when anyone said, “It’s none of my business.” That to me was almost the thesis of a show—a bunch of people keeping secrets or being left in the dark. Now, with Season Two, the characters have established the idea of “Yes, we can build this bomb,” and it seems as though this season is moving towards the use of the bomb.
Shaw: First of all, I will say I have a blood brother on the writing side, who helps me run the writers’ room. If it were up to him, someone would say, “That’s not my business” in practically every scene of our show (laughs). But, yes, one thing that’s really interesting to me about Los Alamos is you move to this place that has this quasi-authoritarian code of secrecy. It compartmentalized colleagues from each other, and husbands from wives and parents from children. There’s this code that dictates what you can and can’t talk about. How do you respond to it? Do you fight against it or internalize it? That was a big part of the first season.

In terms of Season Two, you’re absolutely right. Season One was a story of the race between these two competing scientific designs for an automatic bomb. The second season is really a race towards this event that is coming. They all know it’s coming and they’ve taken on the burden of delivering the weapon in a certain time frame and there’s going to be a test. There’s an inexorable forward momentum to the history we’re dealing with, and I think that became a mode of the storytelling too. I think there was a quality of a sprint or marathon to this season.

Paste: The first scene of the second season is a flash-forward to three weeks before Hiroshima. I know one thing people probably brought up with the first season is “how long can this show realistically go on for?” That first scene almost felt like you guys throwing down and saying, “this story can go on beyond this point.”
Shaw: I wish I could say that was expressly why we began the season the way we do. It is true that a trick-up-the-sleeve of the show from the beginning to me is that it presents itself as a story about WWII and presents itself about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it is about those events. But I think it’s much more a show about the birth of something new and the beginning of the Atomic Age, than it is about the end of the Second World War. It’s about what’s over that atomic horizon. In pitching the show to the network, and in breaking stories, I always saw the dropping of those bombs as the equator in our story. It’s this midway point. To me, the most interesting and complicated and dramatic story material exists on the other side of that event.

Paste: That’s your Game of Thrones Red Wedding.
Shaw: Yes, in a way that’s true! In terms of that opening, one thing I’ll say about it is, by the time we get to the end of this season, I think observant viewers will find that much of the ending of our story is hiding in plain sight in the first five or six minutes. Not in a self-conscious way. It’s not about setting up a bunch of mysteries and puzzles in those first minutes, but a lot of the sort of dramatic developments that takes place over the season are at least hinted at in some of the dynamics of those first few minutes. That was part of what was interesting to us—to present an ending and only really come to understand the meaning of it by the end of this 10 hour movie we’re making.

Paste: You’ve talked about the incorporation of real-life figures. In the third episode—and I won’t say who it is—there’s a very prominent real-life figure that appears. Basically, Frank is credited with helping to make a very important historical decision in conjunction with this character. How does that work, in terms of melding your fictional characters with real historical events?
Shaw: That’s a great question. I don’t want to say too much about the specifics of that third episode. What I’ll say is that there are a few very well known figures associated with the Manhattan Project whose ethical relationship to the bomb they were building changed dramatically in a very short period of time. Frank became a way of dramatizing some very complicated ethical journeys that some of the real physicists involved with the Manhattan Project embarked on. In terms of the question of what is fictitious, and what is true and does our universe acknowledge the existence of those real figures, [history consultant] Alex Wellerstein once said something I love, which is, “There are models in physics that suggest the existence of many parallel universes.” He likes to think in some ways that Manhattan takes place in a parallel universe that is a near identical copy to our own. They’re really similar—they both have an Oppenheimer and those Oppenheimers bear a striking resemblance to each other. The circumstances of the war are the same. The laws of physics are the same. It just so happens that this Manhattan Project is populated with some human beings who are different from the human beings in the other universe. That’s the dramatic code we try to adhere to.

Paste: I want to talk a bit about your relationship with WGN. In terms of chronology, had Salem [their first original series] already been put into production by the time you guys were shopping this around?
Shaw: They had just bought Salem, but it was not yet in production when we first met with them and they bought our show and picked it up straight-to-series.

Paste: And that was the key to your decision? A straight-to-series order?
Shaw: It was certainly a key. Look, they’ve been really fantastic, supportive partners to us, which you hope will be the case with a network, but isn’t always the case. But yes, the great gift they gave us was the opportunity of, rather than making a pilot, just going straight-to-series and making 13 episodes. I’d written the first draft of this show years before, and Tom Schlamme and I partnered up, and we hooked up with Skydance TV and Lionsgate. We sat down with a bunch of networks and we were kind of moving toward the altar with another network…

Paste: Can you say which one it was?
Shaw: I won’t, but in some ways it was a place that might seem like a more obvious home for a kind of big, epic expensive period drama of this kind, versus WGN, which is a network I knew nothing about and most people didn’t.

Paste: It’s the World’s Greatest Newspaper.
Shaw: I will tell you, when I learned that WGN stands for World’s Greatest Newspaper, my head exploded and then my heart swelled with love because there is something so beautifully insane about that acronym (laughs). It’s not the most humble acronym, but I like the ambition. But, yeah, we were in the process of doing some revisions to what we thought would be the pilot episode with this other network. Then we met with WGN. and they offered us the chance to go straight-to-series and it was an offer we couldn’t’ refuse.

Paste: I haven’t seen enough of Salem to form an idea, but what, if any, restrictions do you have in terms of content? Are you allowed to use f-bombs once or twice per season? What are the parameters on nudity? Can you show sideboob?
Shaw: I love that you just used the word ‘sideboob’ (laughs). Anyway, first of all, I have this idea—I don’t know where this cultural idea comes from—but I thought one is allowed one to two “fucks” per season. Maybe it was the case with Breaking Bad. I actually at some point called up a guy at the network and said, “This is it, we’re going to spend our one fuck!” and he was like, “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about” (laughs). So, no, we’re not permitted to use that word and there’s a few other words we’re not allowed to use. There’s a less clear-cut set of questions in regards to nudity and simulated sex. That becomes more a negotiation with standards and practices.

Paste: I imagine those are the most awkward phone calls.
Shaw: It’s a little surreal. And it really becomes a question of shaving six or so frames off a shot. But, look, our show is not a show that tries in its storytelling to titillate its audience, or show a certain amount of Ash Zuckerman naked, although—you know—he’s a handsome man. For the most part, we don’t run afoul of standards and practices in that way. I do wish we could say “fuck” from time to time.

Paste: Going into your background, is being a writer something you always aspired to? You mentioned wanting to be a novelist for a long time.
Shaw: Yes, for basically most of my adult or pre-adult life I wanted to be a fiction writer. There was a brief respite where I thought I would be a jazz guitar player instead. Which is, if anything, even more of a folly (laughs). But for most of my life it was about prose writing. When I was a little kid, my dad would bring home his dry cleaned shirts and they would come with these cardboard sheets in the back .He would give me the sheets and I would write what I thought were novels on them. I wrote a lot of fiction in high school and wrote a novel for my thesis in college. I went to [Iowa Writers’ Workshop] and got an MFA. That was, in its own way, the closest analog of what it must have been to travel to Mexico and work on the Manhattan Project. We were not trying to build an apocalyptic weapon, but it was this experience of being in this sort of rarified air surrounded by these talented people with these legendary fiction writer teachers. I loved it and adored it. I met my wife there, and she now writes for our show. Two other writers on our staff were classmates of mine. A friend of mine was a novelist, and started working in television and he roped me into doing work on a show he created. I loved it. It wasn’t as soul-killingly isolating as the life of a fiction writer is.

Paste: That was The Evidence?
Shaw: Yes, it was created by Dustin Thomason, who is a writer on Manhattan. He and another writer, Sam Baum, who is now a close friend of mine, created the show and I had just finished Iowa, and I was living in this farmhouse in Connecticut writing fiction. They invited me to do some work on the show. Kind of a crash course in TV.

Paste: What was the show that finally got you out to LA?
Shaw: The Evidence was canceled, and Dusty and I wrote a pilot together for FX. We came out here and pitched and sold the pilot. It was a time travel pilot. I was working on a whole lot of other stuff. I was living in New York and writing fiction and non-fiction, and writing magazine stuff for Harper’s and did a radio thing for This American Life.

Paste: Are you featured on the episode?
Shaw: Just one—it took months of my life and I’m very proud of it. I was so in awe of those guys and their work. It was about the early days of the cryonics movement, and the guy who froze the first human being in the 1960s with the hope he’d be resuscitated and brought back to life in the future. The episode’s called Mistakes Were Made. Anyway, I did a lot of random work in a whole bunch of different genres. I felt like I was looking for a college major, in a way. Then, Sam Baum and I wrote this pilot Cocked about the gun business. While we were working on that project, we moved out to LA, and part of the reason was it just became too unwieldy spending hours every day on Skype with Sam.

Paste: You were on Masters of Sex which was run by Michelle Ashford. What did you learn from her in terms of applying that knowledge to your own show?
Shaw: Michelle is one of the coolest human beings I know. I love her. There’s another executive producer who was working on the show then named Amy Lippman, who was also a great friend and teacher. I learned a few things. If the lay viewer had any sense of exactly how messy and crazy the process of making a TV show is, they’d be amazed that any show is any good at all. A TV show is such an elaborate machine with so many moving parts and, of course, you have these financial burdens being born by the network and financers and you’re working with a lot of other interpretive artists. One thing that I learned and admired a great deal from both Michelle and Amy is grace under fire…That was one lesson just in the business of running the show that was valuable to me. They were bulletproof in the face of those challenges.

Paste: As someone who listened to Sigur Ros and Jonsi’s solo stuff on repeat in my dorm room, I was amazed to see Jonsi and Alex were doing the music. It’s such an offbeat choice, since it’s such a modern sound played against a period drama.
Shaw: I’m glad you brought that up. I love the music on our show so much. It’s such an essential part of the show to me. I should say that we had an incredible time working with those guys, but Jonsi is working on an album and was not able to return, so we have new composers in the second season that have done some brilliant work. It’s this guy named Jeff Russo who is a seasoned composer. He composed the score for Fargo and The Returned, and he’s collaborating with Zoe Keating who’s an incredible cellist. Part of the thing was how do we evolve the sound we had, but give them the freedom to create their own palette rather than just copying the palette set by Jonsi and Alex, which they did brilliantly.

I will say, in terms of Jonsi and Alex, I was so excited when Russell Ziecker, the music guru at Lionsgate, was suggesting composers and he’d just had a meeting with Jonsi and Alex. Lionsgate was talking about a bunch of projects they had in development. He said, “There’s this TV show about the development of the atomic bomb.” He said they both perked up in their seats and said, “Tell us more about that.” They’re brilliant and slightly otherworldly….They approached it with such originality because they did not have a rote set of ideas of how you compose for television. There was something in the ethereal sounds of theirs combined with the other sounds in our show, which are these 1940s needle drops on radios. That collision helped give the show its Twilight Zone vibe and elevate it above the storytelling modes and aesthetics you associate with WWII and 1940s storytelling.

Paste: The talk of the town lately has been [FX president] Jon Landgraf’s comments about peak TV. Personally, I feel as though, if the show had been airing five years ago, it would be up for so many Emmys. Is that a concern for you as a creator—trying to hold your own in this avalanche of TV?
Shaw: One of my teachers at Iowa, Ethan Canin, used to say that he didn’t think of himself as a writer. He thought of himself as a reader moved to emulation. It’s a phrase I loved. I always identified with it too. I might have been a kid with Peter Frampton records up on my wall, but instead of Peter Frampton it was Cheever and Nabokov and Alice Munro. That’s the way I feel about television. I love TV. In fact, the only thing that is a true horror about making the show is that there are large swaths of the year where I don’t get to watch TV. Because life is too crazy, and then I get to binge and catch up after. I will never bemoan the fact that there’s’ a lot of great stuff to watch. I find it inspiring as someone who works in this business. Yes, it’s much harder to capture an audience, but I think that quality shows find an audience eventually, and the hope is just that they find the audience that can sustain them in time to stay on the air.

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