With a Second Life on Amazon, The Expanse Is Soaring – The Ringer

While the era of Peak TV has yielded more scripted programmingprobably too muchthan ever before, it doesnt mean shows with devoted fan bases are impervious to the throes of an early cancellation. That sad fate befell beloved series as disparate as Whiskey Cavalier, Lodge 49, and The OA earlier this year, though fans didnt let them go without creative revival campaigns, ranging from A-listers spreading hashtags (Tom Hanks would like to #SaveLodge49) to, um, hunger strikes. (The OA fandom is intensely passionate and profoundly weird.) But sometimes a revival campaign can help lead to, well, exactly what the fans want.

In May 2018, after Syfy canceled The Expanse after three seasons, the shows fandom quickly mobilized in the nerdiest and most on-brand way possible. Fans put together enough money to fly an airplane banner over Amazon Studios headquarters in Santa Monica, California, and even sent a small model replica of one of the series ships to the edge of outer space. Less than three weeks after its cancellation, none other than Jeff Bezos got to inform the cast and crew of The Expanse, which was attending the annual International Space Development Conference, that the series would get a second life on Amazon Prime. In the video, I was the only one who doesnt stand up at the table, Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar tells me. I was just sitting there in shock.

Though Bezos had his own reasons for wanting the company to revive The Expansehes a fan of the book series of the same name, and was reportedly livid when Syfy initially acquired the rights to itits a testament to the power of the show itself that it inspires this kind of fervor in non-richest-person-on-earth viewers.

The simplest log line for The Expanse is that its basically space Game of Thrones. (But considering how poorly that series just ended and how many Thrones imitators are flailing, such a comparison might now be a disservice.) Heres the longer pitch: Set 200 years in the future, the story finds humanity spread throughout the solar system and on the brink of interplanetary war. The three main factions are people still on Earth, the militaristic Martians (meaning: humans on Mars), and those living around the Asteroid Belt, known as Belters. These tensions are elevated by the discovery of the protomolecule, a mysterious alien substance from the far reaches of space that mankind wants to weaponize. Thankfully, once its revealed that the substance appears to have its own beguiling agenda, a fragile peace is attained by the factions as a unified front against the protomolecule threat. By the end of the third season, the protomolecule has done a lot of weird shit on its ownincluding opening the Sol Ring, a gateway to a new galaxy with unexplored, and potentially habitable, worlds.

With things looking so bleak in our solar systemunemployment rates are high on Earth; the Belters have always felt disenfranchised; Mars terraforming seems kind of pointless after the Ring opens up the possibility of traveling to countless potentially habitable planetsthe fourth season opens on the cusp of an interstellar gold rush. A few Belter ships snuck through the Ring before a blockade was properly enforced, and one community has formed on a distant lithium-rich planet theyre calling Ilus. Our main protagonistsJames Holden, Naomi Nagata, Amos Burton, and Alex Kamal, whove dealt with the protomolecule firsthandare tasked with going to Ilus and making sure more protomolecule-related chaos doesnt erupt, which, of course, it inevitably does.

I havent even gotten to an upcoming election on Earth between incumbent U.N. Secretary-General Chrisjen Avasarala and a political opponent who wants to sanction more colonization of the Ring; a subplot with former Martian Marine Bobbie Draper getting enveloped with black-market dealings on Mars; and rising tensions between the U.N. and the Belters overseeing the Ring blockade. (Trying to streamline The Expanses impressive scope any further will only result in a massive migraine.) It speaks to the rich world-building of the series, which is also deeply considered and rooted in the sort of scientific minutiae you wont find in the worlds of Star Wars or Star Trek. I still contend that space is dope, but The Expanse underscores just how volatile and inherently dangerous intergalactic colonization can beand more importantly, makes it clear that traversing the solar system for 200 years hasnt made humanity any less prejudiced.

According to experts in the field, The Expanse is the best show on TV about international relations, and has felt like the closest heir apparent to Ronald D. Moores Battlestar Galactica, a sci-fi masterpiece from what was then called Sci Fi during the mid-2000s. Its for that reason, sadly, that The Expanse seemed like such an outlier on Syfy, where critical hits like The Magicians and Wynonna Earp are mostly overshadowed by a preponderance of cheesy trashand Im not just talking about the Sharknado franchise. (The nicest thing I can say about Apple TV+s Blind Jason Momoa show is that it has High Production Value Syfy energy.) With The Expanse having a home on basic cable for three seasons, restrictions on things like expletives and episode running times had a natural effect on the story. We were absolutely maxed out at 43 minutes, we could not go a second longer, Shankar says. I watch some of those older episodes and I go, Man, it wouldve been so nice to just give the thing two more minutes to breathe. Couldnt do it. And thats a huge advantage of [Amazon].

In Shankars view, The Expanse and its (no pun intended) expansive tale are a natural fit for streaming. From the beginning of the series, Shankar and the shows writing staff never broke the story with act breaksin other words, writing with the understanding that certain scenes would end with commercial interruptions. When we put the episodes on streaming, I went back to our post-production guys and we closed all of the blacks and we fixed the music and picture edits, he says. The streaming versions that you watch are just continuous. The Amazon move also afforded Shankars team the opportunity to shoot in a wider aspect ratio for the scenes on Ilus, which is the first time a major story line in the series takes place on a planet instead of in outer space. Theres a surreal quality to Iluss landscapesthe scenes were filmed in Ontariothat evokes a mixture of wonder and terror; an experience elevated by being able to mix different aspect ratios in space and on the ground. Those are things that you can do on streaming that people dont even blink an eye about, Shankar says, but you just cant do them on more traditional platforms.

But while streamers and networks like HBO and Showtime can offer a lot of creative freedom, theres always the concern about overindulgence. Some series seem to conflate lengthy running timesand depending on the show, gratuitous materialwith a marker of prestige, a trend Vultures Kathryn VanArendonk aptly described last year as the manspreading of TV. There was no specific reason to think The Expanse would go down this path once it moved to streaming, but there was still that nagging anxiety that it would become a guilty offender like Westworld, The Romanoffs, Ozark, or Sons of Anarchy. Though the shows a little too trigger-happy with the expletives in Season 4lessening the impact of Avasaralas iconic tirades, where seemingly every sentence includes the F-wordnone of the first six episodes made available for review crossed the 49-minute threshold, and nothing seems tonally jarring or out of place. The Expanses fourth season feels like a fine-tuned version of its old selfand its old self was already the best sci-fi series on television.

Perhaps the most crucial difference for fans will be The Expanses rollout: Instead of episodes dropping weekly, the entire season will be available to binge on Friday. The ongoing debate over whether series are better served by dropping all episodes at once or by going weeklyits no coincidence that our Baby Yoda obsession will run through Christmasis best considered on a show-by-show basis. But The Expanse will be an interesting litmus test by virtue of changing its release model; even Shankar admits that sustaining a weekly conversation and engaging with viewers on social media was important for the series during its Syfy days. The relationship that was formed in those years was part of the reason people felt so possessive of the show in terms of the fandom, he says. I dont actually know how [the binge model]s going to be. Im super curious to find out.

Thankfully, what wont change is what the series imparts on viewers. The central conflict on Ilus lies between the Belter refugees and a corporation from Earth thats barely hiding its intention to take the planet for itself under the pretext of scientific researchall while Holden and Co. try to get everyone to stop fighting among themselves and focus on the planetwide protomolecule threat that could wipe them all out. Humanitys hubris in trying to weaponize the futuristic equivalent of a nuclear weapon nearly led to mass extinction in the third season; the colonization efforts are doing that in miniature, endangering everyone on the planet in similarly unpredictable ways. The perpetual struggle of everyday people entangled in political and corporate greedas those in power continue to underestimate a genuine existential threatis what propels The Expanse to such compelling heights, even as the shows narrative moves farther into the cosmos.

The Expanses fourth season covers the fourth novel in the eponymous book series from James S.A. Corey, the single pen name for the books writers, Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, who are also intimately involved with the show. Unlike Thrones, Shankar and his team dont have to worry about outpacing their source material: The ninth and final book in the series is expected to arrive in 2020, and after publishing eight books in the past nine years, theres little doubt Franck and Abraham will meet that deadline. The guys created this beautiful, intricate, complex, detailed storyand we havent departed from that, Shankar says. Thats the road map. Thats what were here to do. I hope we get to finish all nine books, because I think it would be an amazing thing to tell a complete story with this kind of canvas. I dont think its really been done in science fiction before.

And in the short term, the cast and crew of The Expanse dont have to worry about a second cancellation: Amazon renewed the show for a fifth season back in July. Everything beyond that is still undeterminedand its certainly not a guarantee that Amazon will let Shankar and Co. continue this interstellar journey deep into the 2020s. But after a year when The Expanse was canceled and fans were paying for airplane banners in a loving attempt to bring attention to the series, even the potential to end the series on their own terms is better than nothing at all. Ty and Daniel often say they intend to stick the landing, Shankar says. We will as well.

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With a Second Life on Amazon, The Expanse Is Soaring - The Ringer