‘A Murder at the End of the World’ showrunner Zal Batmanglij on exploring our ‘global mess’ through mystery [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“A Murder at the End of the World” co-creator and showrunner Zal Batmanglij notes “that the whodunnit rose in popularity” between the World Wars because of feelings of questioning and disarray, “and we felt that there was a similar mood in the air in 2019 when we started working on this story, that we were all … trying to figure out how did we get here to this sort of global mess.” So he and his creative partner Brit Marling made a murder mystery that would “also wrestle with some of those ideas.” We talked to Batmanglij as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV showrunners panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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Emma Corrin stars as Darby Hart, an amateur sleuth and true-crime writer who is mysteriously invited to an exclusive retreat by tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen). But at that retreat she finds herself having to solve another murder. Batmanglij and Marling “wanted to tell a murder mystery from the perspective of a young woman because usually young women are the victims in these stories,” he explains. “What’s exciting about writing Darby Hart is that with Gen-Z, for the first time, you can have a young woman who’s credible as a detective because she’s put in Malcolm Gladwell‘s classic 10,000 hours of hard work. She just started at 13, working on her father’s crime scenes because he was the coroner.”
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Through its mystery, the series also explores modern anxieties about climate change and advancing technology: “At some point when we were writing this story I had to leave LA because my partner has asthma and the wildfires were so bad,” Batmanglij explains. “When you’re starting to leave your home because of the devastating effects of climate crisis, how can you not address that in your story?” So “I think it’s strange that more stories don’t deal with the things that we’re all faced with.” We can find comfort in being able to solve a murder. It’s much harder to resolve the forces of the atmosphere.
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