'Manhattan' Boss on Favoring Emotional Truth Over Historical Detail

Matthew Weiner raised the bar on period television with Mad Men, thanks to his knack for weaving historical figures and events seamlessly into the lives of the fictional ad men and the women who hate to love them. And that includes his painstaking attention to every ’60s detail, from Sally’s white go-go boots to what Don Draper eats (or more likely drinks) at Barbetta.

As the show and its nostalgic near-perfection have been a big hit with critics, viewers, and award-show voters, other TV writers and producers know they need to up their fact-checking game when creating programs that feature real people, places, and past events.

Such was the case with Sam Shaw (Masters of Sex, This American Life) as he set about developing Manhattan, the WGN America drama that examines life in World War II-era Los Alamos, the New Mexico town that the atomic bomb built.

[Photos: Check Out More Pics From WGN America’s ‘Manhattan’]

“Mad Men is such a brilliant show. Matthew Weiner is so scrupulous about research and authenticity that he doesn’t even allow music cues that aren’t from that time period. That detail takes the viewer to a very specific place and time and gives the story so much texture. When you are creating a new show based on history, you can’t help but think about that model now,” Shaw told Yahoo TV via phone.

"We handle it a little differently. We made a decision early on that is important for our show, which translated to the way we thought about story, production design, and even music cues. It was more important to capture the emotional truth of the story than recreate a perfect forensic copy of the past," Shaw revealed.

"There are music cues in the pilot that are the ’50s or ’60s, because they worked better for those scenes than ones from the ’40s. And I’m certain, here and there, there is a No. 2 pencil from 1950 that slipped in. Mistakes, especially the kind that feel false and pull you out of the emotional experience, are something we tried to avoid with everything we’ve got, but they’re also inevitable and not our principal focus."

Watch a sneak peek of Sunday’s all-new episode of Manhattan:

Before atomic-age aficionados get their Jockeys without elastic waistbands in a bunch, Shaw swore that his attitude toward tiny anachronisms does not mean he allowed the rewriting of history for the sake of entertainment. “It will never become a work of science fiction. We won’t drop a bomb on Chicago, let the Japanese win the war, or mess with the science. We were sticking to the history as faithfully as we possibly could, [although] there are places now and again when we diverge from the historical record, and people will have questions about choices we made, but I assure you we undertook them carefully. We felt a huge obligation to honor the people who were involved in this place and the Manhattan Project.”

To achieve that end, Shaw, who wrote the first draft of the pilot six years ago before working on Masters of Sex as a writer, went into “research nerd” mode, devouring every movie, article, memoir, letter, book, podcast, oral history, diary, and documentary about the era he could find. “I spent a couple of years going down a rabbit hole and reading literally everything I could. It’s a very deep well, but one of the great privileges of this job — and the last few gigs that I’ve had, actually — is the opportunity to go back to school and learn a huge amount about a subject that is not my area of expertise.”

The writers received an informal syllabus, continued to find and share sources such as the Los Alamos Historical Society, ran things by fact-checkers who “made sure we were sticking to history as faithfully as possible,” and leaned heavily on “a couple of fantastic science consultants,” including UCLA physics and astronomy professor David Saltzberg, who also works on The Big Bang Theory.

"We also have a guy [on set] that works with the production crew to make sure the math on the blackboards is accurate and that the lab equipment is being used correctly," Shaw said. "He works with the actors to make sure that they are handling radioactive materials the way they would have been handled back then, and so on."

Another important choice Shaw made early on was to center the series around fictional characters inspired by the primary source materials, instead of the boldfaced names in bomb-building such as J. Robert Oppenheimer (who does appear in the first episode, played by Daniel London) and the Manhattan Project’s main military man, Gen. Leslie Groves.

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"A handful of nonfictional characters appear over the course of the first season, but we’ve seen the stories of the big names. What I was interested in was the everyday lives of all of these thousands of people who lived in this completely bizarre Twilight Zone bubble in the desert surrounded by barbed-wire fences and built to accomplish this huge, complicated, morally ambiguous undertaking whose stories haven’t been told,” Shaw explained.

"All of the people that didn’t know what the purpose of the town was — the kids, spouses, teachers, grocers, maids — still had a sense that something profound and important was happening there. They all lived under the same tight security and rules and dealt with the same complications of living in the middle of nowhere. It is more a story about the weird conflicts between their professions, marriages, and friendships. This kind of secrecy puts a lot of pressure on people and tests their relationships. But you also get the sense that it was like summer camp; and for some, especially the scientists, who had every resource they could imagine and were at the center of changing the world, these were the best years of their lives."

John Benjamin Hickey (The Big C, The Good Wife), who plays brilliant and brash physicist Frank Winter, added, “I read [that] at first, Groves insisted that all the physicists wear military uniforms, but Oppenheimer convinced him that in order for them to do what they were doing, to think freely as scientists, they would never be able to be in uniform. I always think of that as a dividing line between what the Army was doing and what those scientists were doing. It’s essentially what this show is about: the difference between those two worlds.”

While the folks are fictional, many of the memorable moments from Season 1 are ripped straight from the research, such as water and electricity outages, a lice outbreak, overzealous spy-hunting, peyote usage, a shortage of bathtubs, a surplus of top-shelf liquor and good beef (“It was a place of feast or famine,” Shaw added), and notoriously bad ovens. “Some pieces of the day-to-day of the place have become lore. You encounter stories about these Black Beauty ovens in almost everything you read, because they were disastrous nightmares that made the apartments sweltering and smoky all the time.”

One thing Shaw knew could not be faked was the landscape and the New Mexico light. Shaw lamented, “The landscape is such a part of this story. It would have felt so false if we were green-screening sunsets or keeping everybody trapped inside a building all day. Period shows are expensive and ours is so sprawling, which is one of the reasons it was hard to shepherd this to TV.”

Luckily for him, veteran Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing, Spin City, Parenthood) came on as an executive producer and director, and “from the beginning, he wanted to do exactly what the Army did — build a town.” As they didn’t have quite the same budget, they settled for rehabilitating a rundown 1940s-era hospital adjacent to the college of art in Santa Fe. Shaw raved, “We created an 11-acre three-dimensional real world with actual buildings, real science equipment in the labs, military trucks driving by. You can go inside and open the cupboards and there are real dishes. That gives [the set] this invaluable texture that has been a huge gift for the show and for the actors in terms of making it feel real. They’re in 1943 all the time.”

[Related: Thomas Schlamme Compares ‘Manhattan’ to ‘The West Wing’]

Hickey concurred that the comprehensive living-history-type set was “invaluable for helping get into character. As an actor, so much of your work has been done for you by the amazing design team. The five-dollar word for it is ‘verisimilitude.’ It’s like the Jurassic Park of television-show sets. Everywhere you look, every drawer you open, the matches from a real 1940s matchbox that I use to light my cigarette, put you in that time and place. You feel like you are really there. Until they bring you a neon-blue Gatorade and you remember what year it is.”

Manhattan airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on WGN America.