‘World on Fire’ Creator Peter Bowker on Shaking Up His War Drama in Season 2: ‘We Can Do So Much More’ Than Show the ‘White European Perspective’
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When “World on Fire” premiered on the BBC in September 2019, no one could have known that the World War II drama would be one of the last major scripted debuts on the public broadcaster before the pandemic.
The PBS Masterpiece co-production — which follows the interconnected lives of British and European families during the outbreak of war — confirmed it would return at the end of its Season 1 finale, but the onset of the COVID-19 crisis just four months later and its impact on global production made the prospect of setting up a continent-spanning war drama all the more unlikely.
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Yet with some heroic scheduling, rewritten scripts and clever location and CGI combos, Season 2 returned to British screens on Sunday after a four-year hiatus, premiering to an audience indelibly changed by a global and life-altering event of their own.
“I wrote the bulk of the first two episodes during lockdown, and suddenly, this feeling didn’t seem so far away,” the show’s writer, Peter Bowker, tells Variety. “It feels like we have a better understood connection with what it feels like to be both very tiny in this world, but very much part of a connected world.”
Season 1 was led by Helen Hunt, Sean Bean, Lesley Manville, and a then little-known Jonah Hauer-King. The British actor had played Laurie alongside Maya Hawke in the BBC’s 2017 “Little Women” adaptation, but received global attention when he was cast as Prince Eric in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” just as “World on Fire” was ending. In Season 2, Hauer-King’s Harry Chase leads the series.
There are other casting changes, too: Bean’s schedule didn’t align with Season 2 production, and, in a familiar turn of events for Bean, his character is killed off, with Mark Bonnar introduced as a new sparring partner for Manville’s thorny matriarch Robina. Meanwhile, with no obvious trajectory for Hunt’s American journalist in Berlin after Season 1, she’s not part of the new series, either. Such changes made room for the introduction of Ahad Raza Mir, who masterfully inhabits an Indian soldier in the uncomfortable position of fighting for the British while yearning for his country’s independence as a British colony.
Bowker, who’s known for “The A Word” and “Monroe,” confides that he’s got some nerves about the show returning to the BBC after such a long period of time, but makes clear that Season 2 is also crafted for those coming to “World on Fire” with fresh eyes.
“There’s quite a bit of it that’s a clean start, because in the end, if we were picking up too much from Season 1, an audience that hadn’t caught up or hadn’t watched it before will be referring back to something that just wasn’t in their consciousness sufficiently,” says Bowker.
Read on for Variety’s full interview with the “World on Fire” creator.
Did you have Season 2 written by the time the pandemic hit? How did you navigate that?
I had a plan. I knew what we were going to do in Season 2. By the time it was recommissioned, I’d already plotted it, but that was based on everybody being available within six months. And so there was a period of adjustment because, obviously, the knock-on effects of COVID, apart from the fact that it was filmed under COVID protocol, was that everyone’s availability started to become an issue because everybody’s worlds locked up. And there are some pretty high-profile people [in the cast] who are working all the time. So Sean Bean isn’t in it. That was due to Sean’s availability. Then with the second wave of COVID, the long-tail of the second wave delayed the production again because it impacted where we were going to film and who was going to be in it. I kept having to recalibrate the stories. I knew there was no point in recreating the Sean Bean character, so I thought, “What would be the opposite character? What would he look like?” And I came up with the James Danemere figure, who is played by Mark Bonnar. The two things that kept changing were cast and crew availability and location.
It felt different watching Season 2 compared to Season 1 because of the pandemic in between, which was a global event that touched everyone’s lives. That shared experience made shows and movies about the war feel somehow more accessible. Did that play in your mind at all when you were readying the new scripts?
Oh, definitely. I wrote the bulk of the first two episodes during lockdown, and I agree that, suddenly, this feeling didn’t seem so far away. And that’s right down to the fact that we all speculated how it was for everybody else in other countries. There was a feeling that the endeavor was global. So we felt what we all had in common as human beings quite acutely, as well as the potential for what divided us in terms of resources. That was definitely in my head writing it and I agree that watching it now, it feels like that for me as well. It feels like we have a better understood connection with what it feels like to be both very tiny in this world, but very much part of a connected world.
Are you concerned at all about the four-year gap for audiences between Season 1 and Season 2?
There’s a three-minute [review of Season 1] at the top. But obviously, it’s different than how it would have been if we’d been picking it up a year later. And it was a concern in writing it because part of me was thinking I was writing a brand new series. There will be people who didn’t watch it. There will be people who don’t remember it, but then again, there are people who do remember. So it was tricky. There’s quite a bit of it that’s a clean start, because in the end, if we were picking up too much from Season 1, an audience that hadn’t caught up or hadn’t watched it before will be referring back to something that just wasn’t in their consciousness sufficiently. The gap is a worry because when you’re launching a new show, that feels very different from launching a second season.
In Season 2, you’re very focused on showing diverse perspectives on the war, such as the British Indian soldier Rajib, and the complexity of his wartime experience. Had you always intended to have that in the story?
Definitely, in the very, very beginning. The whole genesis of the idea was to tell the war from multiple perspectives, and to tell the global conflict from multiple global perspectives. As somebody who grew up in Britain — and it may be different at schools now — but I did not grow up [knowing] there were soldiers from India, Australia and the West Indies that the Empire was tapping into in such a — well, one word would be practical and the other word would be cynical — way. As a dramatist, what’s interesting is the internal conflict that that causes for the character. The other thing I wanted to reclaim, from everything I read when I started to research, was that the Indian officers who were from military families are often portrayed as quite naïve in fighting for the Empire, but actually, that was a pragmatic decision. They knew exactly the situation they were in, and I think Rajib says at one point, “Well, it’s either the Nazis or it’s the Brits who will be running us. So, this gives us leverage.” This gives leverage toward getting to independence — so rather than the naiveté that’s often shown, which I think is the false version, I wanted to sort of [show that] these men knew what the deal was and articulate that.
Was there an added responsibility of showing the British Indian army given the dialogue around representation that the industry’s been having since 2020? Was that important for the BBC in their notes to you?
The BBC were very much in support of that. But I always knew that with this series, I wanted it to feature [more voices]. Look, there is a great collection of World War II films and TV series about the white European perspective. You know, why would we bother even making another? We can do so much more here. So yes, obviously there’s a push for greater diversity and representation and quite right. But this was entirely driven by me and the team. That was always the vision for this piece and will carry on being the vision.
You also have a German perspective in each season, and in this one, that focuses on a young woman selected to participate in the Lebensborn program, which effectively used German woman to birth “racially pure” Aryan children from SS officers.
Yes. I always want there to be a German’s perspective — and going forward, the Japanese or the Korean perspective. But the spark for the German storyline was actually when I was researching the American journalists who were in Berlin during the first 18 months of the war. It was in the diary of [one journalist], who overheard some teenage girls chatting on the train and giggling. He thought he’d misheard what they’d been talking about, and it went from there. He found out about this scheme of Aryan mothers being used to breed heirs with Aryan men. I thought, “Well, I think there’s something there. That’s extraordinary.” It’s monstrous enough. I don’t have to make that monstrous. My purpose is to dramatize how that could be normalized. And that’s what creates the tension. There was this family who probably bought into the Nazi ideology. And then what happens when your child is so driven by this ideological fervor? Because again, as we’ve seen with other ideological firms, young adolescents are very susceptible to this kind of grooming. And so that’s where the story came from. It’s not common knowledge, but it gave me a vehicle to look at what happens when toxic ideology takes a grip.
“World on Fire” is a co-production with PBS Masterpiece. Did they have any notes about the lack of a big American character in this season, unlike Season 1?
For both [Helen Hunt] and [Brian J. Smith], who plays Webster, I would hope there’s room for them to return in Season 3 because of the American involvement. I think sometimes it comes to a point where obviously with someone as good as Helen, you’re looking at stories. And you’re looking so hard. You’re thinking, “Is this growing the story or growing because I would really, really love Helen to be in it?” There’s a gap between the American journalists being expelled from Berlin and before the Americans joined the war, so [including her] doesn’t really fit with the story. But I would love both of those characters to come back if at all possible. [PBS] was very supportive. They respond to story; they’re not really box-ticking for American actors. They are very keen on the diverse representation.
You’ve said before that you have six seasons in mind for this show. These days, drama costs an awful lot, and there are more complicating factors now given the strike action. How does that inform the next few seasons?
The nature of what I write about often means that there’s an intimacy to a lot of these themes in this epic sort of setting. There’s a sleight of hand that if you have sufficient number of scenes that look very big for television, then people think they’ve seen far more of a battle than they have. I think what people carry is what’s played out on a very small, personal scale within the battle. This season, there is probably more VFX than last time. I don’t tend to write big epic action set pieces. And all I’m interested in is the space between battle. I’m interested in the space between army raids. I’m interested in interrogating the impact of that. There isn’t anything I haven’t worked on where somebody [hasn’t said] “We need to cut that because we just can’t afford it.” I mean, that’s always been part of the industry.
Yes, I do intend to follow this through to the end of the war. The shape of it changes constantly as new stories are unearthed. And fortunately for me, it is not really my job to navigate that, but I’ve written for television for 33 years, and I’ve never not been on a show where scenes have been cut for budgetary considerations or reconfigured. And the other thing I hope is that if we don’t have another pandemic — this season cost a lot because of pandemic conditions, so we might gain some budget back.
Have you heard from the BBC about Season 3 yet?
No, no, we’re at planning stages. It’s usually a case of after the first two episodes have gone out, they start looking at the numbers, and then there’s iPlayer, and then it’s about presenting and saying, “These are the stories we want to tell; this is how we think we can tell them.” You pitch all over again, really.
And do you still have that six-season arc in mind?
Oh yeah. I mean, things changed. It’s moved and all the rest of it will move. But yeah, I know where it can go.
“World on Fire” will air on the BBC every Sunday until August, while the full series is now available on iPlayer. Season 2 will premiere on PBS Masterpiece on Oct. 15.
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