HERE’S the challenge for Eric Kripke, the producer in charge of “Revolution,” an NBC series set on a future Earth without electricity: Take a horror story and make it a fantasy.

Make his characters — and thus the viewers at home — want to keep the lights off and the phones uncharged and the hospitals unequipped.

Mr. Kripke succeeds, in the premiere episode on Sept. 17, by suggesting what can be done with power when it lands in dictatorial hands. An unexpected subtext for a drama seen Mondays at 10 on NBC — but then, the network needs a jolt. It’s betting on “Revolution” to deliver one.

“We wanted not to tell a typical apocalypse story about the end of things, but to tell a story about the beginning of things,” Mr. Kripke said in a telephone interview. That’s the reason he and his producing partners set the series 15 years after the blackout, on a North American continent being reclaimed by nature and divided into warring republics.