The After: More Details About Chris Carter’s New Amazon Series Revealed

By David Wharton | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

CarterAt the height of his career, Chris Carter had four series on television in close succession. Between the years of 1993 and 2002, Fox aired The X-Files, Millennium, Harsh Realm, and The Lone Gunmen. The latter-two were interesting failures that didn’t make it past their first season, but The X-Files is a genre classic and Millennium, at its best, is as good or better than The X-Files. Needless to say, a new Chris Carter series is worthy of attention, and that’s precisely what we’re getting with The After, an apocalyptic series Carter has developed for Amazon. Now The After has officially gotten a greenlight, and we finally know a few more specifics about the drama series. (Not many, but we’ll take what we can get.)

According to Deadline, The After “follows eight strangers who are thrown together by mysterious forces and must help each other survive in a violent world that defies explanation.” It’s also been said that the pilot takes place “at the moment of apocalypse.” So none of this waking up weeks later like Rick Grimes, that slacker. When asked for more details, Carter responds:

I’m very superstitious about talking about what I’m working on before it’s finished, and it’s more fun if it’s kept a mystery! So let me just say that this is a show that explores human frailty, possibility, terror, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Carter both wrote and directed the After pilot, and will presumably serve as showrunner now that’s officially going to series. The cast includes Sharon Lawrence (Rizzoli & Isles), Aldis Hodge (Leverage), Andrew Howard (Limitless), Arielle Kebbel (The Uninvited), Jaina Lee Ortiz (Scream Queens), Adrian Pasdar (Heroes), Louise Monot, and Jamie Kennedy (blurgh).

Whether The After proves to be good or not remains to be seen, but I’m definitely getting a nostalgic happy glow at the knowledge that Chris Carter is returning to the TV landscape…well, to the landscape of scripted programming anyway. (We need a better word for TV that isn’t going to air on traditional TV networks.) It’s also a huge get for Amazon’s original programming. Netflix has set the bar high with shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, so a big name like Carter is just the sort of publicity magnet they need. So long as the show isn’t a flop anyway. Amazon’s highest-profile project so far was the Zombieland series, and that didn’t go very well.

It’ll also be interesting to see one of the masters of arc-heavy genre mythology operating in a post-Lost world. Maybe the old guy’s learned some new tricks during his long vacation (presumably spent swimming in his Scrooge McDuck-style money vault).

The After is a production of Georgeville Television, a major player in the science fiction landscape these days. In addition to The After, they’re developing Brett Ratner’s FBI time travel series Tomorrow, the reboot of the cult British series Blake’s 7, and Sense8, the mysterious Netflix project from Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski and the Wachowskis (The Matrix, Cloud Atlas).