Panic, out on May 28, explores how dangerous things can get when teens are fighting for their future. The series is based on the 2014 YA novel from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver, who also wrote the onscreen adaptation and serves as showrunner.
The story revolves around a group of teens in a small Texan town that play "panic" in order to win enough money to escape a dead-end future. This year, one of the unexpected top contestants is Heather Nill (Olivia Welch, Scream: The Series).
Oliver spoke to Screen Rant about the process of adapting her own work, the changes that naturally surfaced onscreen, and how she hopes to expand the story even further.
I know your work has previously been adapted, such as Before I Fall which you produced as well. But this is your first time writing the adaptation yourself, and you're the showrunner. What has it been like to adapt your own work and see through all those changes?
Lauren Oliver: Obviously, it was a tremendous blessing and gift. I can't think of another studio - it evolved organically, I'm not a control freak. I'm sure somebody else could have taken the material and done a gorgeous job with that as well. But we'd been working on some permutation of Panic almost since it came out. First, the movie rights were sold, and then there was a script. The script was gonna be dead, so then I rewrote it - that was the first script I ever did.
I always wanted it to be TV; I'd always seen it for TV. For the reason that the game, although that's the architecture of the narrative, it's not about the game. It's about revealing the game to be false in some ways, and it's really about the context that gave rise to it. So, all of that really belonged more on TV. Again, even when we first sold it in Amazon, I wrote a pilot. They encouraged me to do that. It really happened step-by-step.
As to the process, I will say, none of it could have happened without the other executive producers who were filling in and stepping in as essentially the parts of show-running that I couldn't do; enabling me to write draft after draft. Some of them were not bad in of itself, but you're in constant communication with the changes in the real world. And some of them were also just bad, I'm sure. I really want to emphasize that.
On the one hand, unfortunately, I can't hide behind a writers room or say that the choices were not mine - which is scary. And on the other hand, it was the people around me - this studio, the executives - who wanted and cared so much about the show that they really did parts of my job that I could not do and didn't know how to do. And they were incredibly gracious about it. I didn't even realize that until much later.
It really became a collaborative thing. The actors themselves brought so much to the characters that changed so much from the book. Because you found new dimensions and new aspects of them, and then you have to change the narrative. But that was the joy and the magic of it to me.
I was actually gonna ask about that. I imagine that some readers might be surprised by relationships that develop differently than they expected. What was it like for you to move the perspective from not just Heather and Dodge and their respective stories to really opening up the story to new of the town?
Lauren Oliver: If it were up to me, every single person you ever see on screen for one second would have their own complete hero's arc. This is part of my problem: I think if you added up all the scripts I did, it would be 90 episodes, 100 hours each, and it would be the most boring story - but it would be about America, basically. It would be about the state of culture.
I think, hopefully, the things that are important to preserve are the thematic exploration and the tone, for lack of a better word. And there are new tools to do it with: all these incredible actors. There were times where it would have been then wrong for me to insist on a certain version of a character or a certain narrative, and you would have seen that onscreen.
It's also been many years. Hopefully, I've grown as a writer. The world has changed; the world has called me as a writer to change, and all of us to change, and hopefully, I'm responding to some extent as much as I can. All of those things, take it away from what was strictly and literally written there. However, if people think the book lies in any of those particular things, that's not right.
Speaking of the tone, I think the juxtaposition of the adrenaline of the game and the hopelessness of the town is really the heart of the story. Are you hoping to do another season, despite it being a standalone book?
Lauren Oliver: I wanted to do another book. I won't get into it, but I had always wanted to do another book. Let me just say it; we don't have to talk about publishing. And it was not my editor either, she loved the book.
But I would love to. We are not in control of such things. Hopefully, people will love it. But yes, I would love to do more. And again, the architecture of a repetitive game that repeats for younger people is kind of a perfect opportunity for something like that. So, hopefully!
Panic's first season premieres May 28 on Amazon Prime Video.