Sci-fi drama Extant explores a world where human-level artificial intelligence is a reality. Centered on the Woods family, it follows astronaut Molly (Halle Berry), who finds herself pregnant after a year alone in space, husband and genius roboticist John (Goran Visnjic), and their son Ethan, a robot and the most advanced AI ever created.

Wired.co.uk caught up with creator Mickey Fisher and showrunner Greg Walker to discuss Extant's creation, how to build a realistic future, using tech to foster personal connections and partnering with Steven Spielberg.

Wired.co.uk: How long had you been working on Extant before you got people like Halle Berry and Steven Spielberg involved?

Mickey Fisher: I'd been carrying the idea round for a couple of years, just in my head. Then I sat down to write it, finished, and put it on the shelf for a year. There were a couple of similar things out at the time, so I thought there was no chance [of it getting made] but that it would be at least a good writing sample. Early last year, I entered it into a contest for TV pilots, which led to a manager and an agency. The next month, the agency said "let's start at the top and take it to Steven Spielberg." So I went from being completely outside the industry to having the most successful filmmaker of all time reading my script.

It was so surreal. My girlfriend was listening to me take the call. I told her they were sending it to Spielberg and she was all "ahh that's amazing!" But then she went back to whatever she was doing and I stared at a wall for 15 trying to wrap my head around it. I sat at a kitchen table looking at a white wall!

Greg Walker: I got involved about a week after it went to Spielberg. The agency did a kind of interview with different showrunners, and the network sat down with Mickey and different writers to see who he clicked with best. A couple of days later, I found out that he liked me best and asked me to come along with him. This was early on in the process, before anyone was attached besides Steven.

What was the inspiration for the script and concept?

MF: I'm certainly a kid who was programmed by Steven Spielberg, growing up with his movies. My earliest memory of any movie is the original Star Wars. I grew up in that sweet spot of not just the movies he directed, but everything he had a hand in. That's another cool thing about being on this TV show. I feel akin to that, in that same spirit. I grew up watching those movies, and when I wrote the pilot, you can see two of the things I was watching heavily at the time—Doctor Who and Friday Night Lights. If those two had a love child, it would be Extant.

There's a lot I love about Doctor Who. I love what it has to say about us as people, what makes us human beings. Friday Night Lights was about a community, about a family. What we strive to do here, day to day, is tell a genre story rooted in a family. Hopefully we succeeded.

Did the similarities between Extant and Spielberg's own A.I. help get the show going?

GW: I think Spielberg came with a ton of credibility about being able to convey these big ideas dramatically and in a hugely popular form. I think that since Mickey's script was trafficking that made for a natural fit.

MF: It's one of those things that revealed itself more later on. The early concepts were much more about the astronaut, Molly Woods, being in space and coming across a person from her past even though she went to space alone, and coming back pregnant. Then I got into writing her husband, and that's where a lot of the show came from. We really felt illuminated by early conversations, about what humanity is, and how do you preserve that in the face of great challenges. How do you make sure it survives? That's the test of these artificial intelligences, the arrival of extra-terrestrials, these massive sea-changes.

You also get a bit existential in places. Was that always planned?

MF: The scene that I wrote early on, which encapsulated everything I really wanted from the show, is where John is giving this presentation on the Humanics program for the Yasumoto Corporation. It becomes this debate over what the nature of the soul is. Are human beings just a collection of memories and information? Is there something more divine about it? It's a debate I've had with myself. There are moments, like when they told me the script had been sent to Spielberg, that it all feels divinely orchestrated. And then there are other days that I feel like a complex sack of meat. That debate rages all the time to define for myself.

Extant is Halle Berry's first regular TV work since 1991—how did you get her involved, and did her coming on board change the scale or perception of the series?

MF: Halle had been given the script by her producing partner, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, before we even started pitching the show. Lucky for us, she expressed interest and an excitement for the material. From the moment her name was mentioned, we couldn't see anyone else in the role. She had all the attributes we wanted for the character—the strength, intelligence, and strong emotional core. Her coming on board gave us a lot of leeway with the character because of how strongly the audience identifies with her. We felt like we could hold them through this journey even when Molly is disconnected or distanced from her family because they're rooting for her to work it out. One of the biggest things it changed is that we decided to shoot in Los Angeles to accommodate her schedule and family life. The crew was thrilled about that.

And how about Pierce Gagnon as Ethan? He's a remarkable young actor.

GW: Pierce was quite a find, wasn't he? We both saw him in Looper, and when I read the script he was the first actor I thought of. In general, there were a lot of times when we heard people being interested and there was no further discussion. People were reading Mickey's script and it was a bit of a feeding frenzy on the studio network level but also on the acting level.

The show airs on CBS in the US and is then almost immediately released through Amazon Prime Instant Video in the UK. Has that changed how you make the show? Is it still primarily aimed at American audiences?

GW: I hope we're not, because when you aim at targets like that you almost always end up missing badly. There is a sweet spot of American television and shows that can fit in there and live a long and prosperous life. But my experience is that you target that area at your own peril. [With Extant] there's a thriller aspect to the show, and we often start an episode just seconds after the previous one ended. That, I think, for instant video binging patterns, is going to be a fun way to watch the show. There won't be that gap you find in other shows. We've structured the episodes so that time is compressed. Over the course of the season, about sixteen days pass. We were inspired by Breaking Bad and then when you see Walter's birthday at the end of season five you realize those seasons have encompassed just a single year. That was genius because I did not notice that. We adapted the passage of time to be more amenable to watching.

Did CBS have any qualms over it being internet-broadcast straight away?

GW: No, I don't think so. It's the new model. It's what they did for Under The Dome and that was hugely successful almost straight away. They were very receptive to this. They're very open to new ideas—there are means of distribution listed on their emails that I've never heard of before—because that's how the market is. It's what they have to do to stay viable as a broadcast entity. They're trying to explore all these different diffusion channels.

Extant's approach to the future is quite grounded—how much research did you do into where technologies are heading in the real world?

GW: Mickey and I went to the Microsoft museum up in Redmond, Washington, and looked at popular science and future technology. That was kind of the spirit of the show when we were creating it, robbing things we like from the future while trying to not make it gadget-centric. We really tried to make sure we didn't put the focus on gadgets but on characters. When I look at the interactions between people and technology in the show, it reminds me that I live in a house built in the 1920's but there's an iPad in that house. We like that collision with the future. We knew we were opening ourselves up to criticism with people saying some device wouldn't exist or wouldn't work like that. In episode two, Molly's making breakfast, and you see there's this flat-bottomed egg. We thought it would be useful, an egg that doesn't roll, rather than a flying hover-vehicle.

So your intention was a more subtle attempt at futurism?

GW: Yeah, I think so. I think that pure tech or gadgets are not really the stuff of great storytelling. They're only important in that they reflect on the characters in how they use them. The larger thing we wanted to talk about was how we interact with technology and how it affects the human experience. It's almost a trope now—that technology distracts us—but we wanted to talk about how it can be used to connect rather than disconnect. That's how we're bettering our thinking. I know Mickey loves all the gadgets in the show though.

MF: Yeah, I wish they were all real, especially the remote-control spaceship. The self-driving car is almost here today, though, so it's not that far off! I think what's interesting is how technology can bring us together. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk—they see technology as a chance to make the world smaller. There is a general idea, a general worry, that technology is dividing us more than bringing us together. I think it's an interesting tension dramatically to draw on for the show.

Are audiences more welcoming, or perhaps hungry, for hard sci-fi compared to the genre shows we got in the '70s through to the '90s?

MF: It definitely seems like we're in a new golden age of sci-fi of all kinds in movies and television. Over the past year or so we've had everything from Oblivion to Gravity, Edge Of Tomorrow, Elysium, and Guardians Of The Galaxy. From the grounded, realistic drama to the most otherworldly and fantastic. Even Man Of Steel was treated as much like sci-fi as it was a superhero story. It's a great time to be on that same wave and hopefully contributing something worthwhile to the conversation.

How are you feeling now Extant is out there, and seeing the response it's been getting?

MF: It's been great. We're shooting the finale right now, have been for the past two weeks. It hasn't quite hit me yet, but I was on Twitter after the first episode, scanning the hashtags and seeing what the general consensus was about it. I'm in this surreal state, still in the bubble of making the show. I haven't really had a chance to step back and acknowledge that it's happened. But I couldn't be more proud of what it is. I think we've done exactly what we set out to do. That's not always the case, when you pour your heart and soul into something and it just doesn't work out. That's not what happened here. I think that people will love it.

Listing image by CBS