In ‘Extrapolations,’ Meryl Steep, Edward Norton, and an all-star cast struggle with the consequences of climate change

In the new streaming series Extrapolations, humanity struggles to live in a world that is growing hotter—and more desperate to find solutions to climate change. 

The Apple TV+ series, created by writer/director/producer Scott Z. Burns, features Kit Harrington, Daveed Diggs, Diane Lane, Forest Whitaker, David Schwimmer, Cherry Jones, and many more in this eight-episode anthology series that spans the years 2037 to 2070. 

Burns—whose writing credits include blockbusters like The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), The Informant! (2009), and Contagion (2011)—has also made a name for himself with timely, socially-conscious filmmaking, notably as a producer of the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

Here, Burns talks about entertainment’s role in engaging the public, talking to religious communities about climate change, and Ernest Hemingway’s influence on the series.

Outrider: What can drama accomplish that documentaries can’t?

Scott Z. Burns: The freedom you get in a scripted series is to really build characters and contemplate other kinds of outcomes rather than the ones we’ve already seen in the world. And that’s what Extrapolations was meant to be—to consider the future, which we don’t know exactly. But we do have a set of predictions. 

When I worked on Contagion, all of the scientists I spoke to said, “It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when we will have another pandemic. 

When I think about extrapolations, basically what the science says about climate change, it’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of what? What will be the consequences?  What will we be able to stop by acting on now? 

And I believe that when you see a story, especially a story populated by some of your favorite actors, it touches you in a very different way than a graph or a set of predictions about sea level or atmospheric carbon.

In one episode, Michael Gandolfini and Edward Norton quote a line from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for…” So who is the Hemingway fan in your circle? Where did it come from?

Well, this is a great question, and I’m thrilled that I get to talk about this. I was a big Hemingway fan and a big Fitzgerald fan. And when Edward and I started talking about the script, Edward told me that his father had a framed photo of some beautiful place—some windswept beach—and had that Hemingway quote on it. 

And he remembered it from growing up. And his father was a lawyer who took on environmental cases. So it actually came from Edward’s life. And when he told me that story, I was like, I have the perfect place to put that in. That’s a wonderful way to have biography resonate inside art. 

In the original John Donne poem, the bell's ringing signifies death. In this instance, is the bell tolling for humanity?

I don’t think that climate change will wipe out human beings. I think that we will eventually do the things we need to do. The key word in that, for me, is eventually.  

The issue becomes when we get to a tipping point of action, and there are a lot of variables that have nothing to do with science. It’s about empathy. It’s about what we do with the current move toward totalitarianism. It’s about how we care about each other. For many people, their experience of climate change comes from other places in the news than the weather report. They can’t buy insurance. They’re seeing farms die in Latin America, and they’re trying to make it to the United States. And that turns into an immigration issue. 

We’re seeing it in Europe with the amount of drought in the Middle East, causing political unrest and immigration. So the issue becomes, how do these knock-on effects get traced back to their source? And then how do we work together to fix it? 

The great promise in this is that we could actually find ourselves coming up with a new approach to how we share the planet—that can have massive benefits and could lead us to a wonderful place. Or it could lead us to a place where more and more people suffer. The second and third-order effects of climate change are famine, poverty, and loss of property. 

Then you get into an issue where the wealth gap becomes part of the problem people can avoid. There’s a line in episode four where a character says, “You’re all talking to me from an air-conditioned room, while there are people on the planet who don’t get to go into an air-conditioned room.”

What I enjoyed about the series was the mix of so many genres. There’s espionage, political intrigue, family drama, action…

I’m thrilled to hear you say that because one of the experiments we consciously undertook was to take a genre and see if we could make climate stories out of it. That idea came out of a book that I read by an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement, where he sets forth some really important questions about the kinds of storytelling we’re doing. 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with his novels, but they frequently have climate change themes. And so Extrapolations was about taking a genre, and theoretically any genre, and moving it into a climate-changed world. 

Tell me about the influences for the series. When I watched it, I thought about Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, the environmental whale story in Star Trek IV, and the cloning of extinct species in the original Jurassic Park. Can you tell me a bit about your mix of influences for the series?

I’m looking forward to reading The Ministry for the Future, but I consciously avoided it. I’m not a huge sci-fi guy, but I love writing in different genres. 

And so the question became: what does a buddy movie look like in the future? What does a thriller look like in the future? I even remember saying in the writers’ room at one point: My thesis is that you could move Romeo and Juliet into the future and decide that there’s a heatwave or forest fires. You should be able to change something as elemental as the planet itself around the story and then see what the reverberations are through the story. 

Screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry, who I worked with on the show, is fond of saying that the shows that pretend that the climate isn’t going to change in the future—those are the shows that are really science fiction.

Can you tell me a little about your collaboration with scientists on the series? And the tension between balancing science and drama?

I worked on An Inconvenient Truth, and since then, I have followed IPCC reports and am aware of the science going on. And I would speak to Al Gore periodically about new emerging science and advances in sustainable goals. 

And then there's an amazing woman who works at Apple named Lisa Jackson, who was Barack Obama’s head of the EPA. And Lisa came to our writers’ room four years ago. I told her what I wanted to do; she has always been an incredible sounding board who can also help me find the best and latest science. [Environmentalist] Bill McKibben is someone I know a little and was also helpful on the show. Elizabeth Kolbert from the New Yorker has done incredible reporting in this area and was always available to speak.

Daveed Diggs plays Rabbi Marshall Zucker in a pair of really compelling stories. And why is it important to engage religious communities about climate change issues?

Religion is a series of stories we tell each other, and those stories have percolated down through generations. 

As the planet changes, you see what happens to the bat mitzvah student in episode three, where she starts asking legitimate questions about faith. And I think we need to help people through that process. What do you think about faith in the context of a changing climate? And is there a way to navigate those things so that it points you towards action rather than towards passivity?

This tension has always fascinated me because this world is temporary for many religious traditions. And so I think there’s some friction when dealing with that kind of philosophy. I’m wondering if you thought about that while crafting these stories.

Quite a bit. My view is that we are stewards of this world; whether you believe in God or not, you still have a responsibility to this planet and its sustenance. And for me, you know, what I love about that episode is, you know, Daveed and Neska Rose have this great back and forth about what the obligation is to the planet. And I leaned kind of into [philosopher] Martin Buber to help me find the answers—that there’s personal responsibility here no matter what. 

Screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry is Catholic, and she will talk to you about the great work the Pope has done to get people to understand that we have a responsibility to the planet and each other. And that’s a great expression of faith.

For all the dire things happening to the planet, are there emerging technologies or trends coming down the pipeline that make you hopeful?

It’s funny; throughout this process, I’ve avoided the word “hope.” To me, “hope” is a four-letter word. 

Hope isn’t enough anymore. We need strategies; we need to have the courage to take action. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore said years ago that we have most of the solutions we need to solve the climate crisis. So I’m hopeful about all of them. Solar is there waiting for us; we have so many ways of harnessing the sun’s power. We have so many good solutions that can help with agriculture. We have so many opportunities to upgrade transportation. 

Recent science has said that if we get to net zero, we may be able to unwind the warming of the planet much more quickly than we thought. So it’s not a question of technological solutions. It’s a question of what sort of empathy and leadership we can get to move us from where we are to a more active strategy.

There’s something that I noticed in the script, and that is: We have this abstraction in our culture today of calling the planet “the environment,” rather than “our home.” Was this a debate in the writers room?

I feel very passionately about that, which is why in the pilot, Yara Shahid’s character says, “You know, we can’t go home. We already are home. It’s our only home.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.