One year and a half after it was officially cancelled by Syfy, The Expanse is about to make its long-awaited return as an Amazon Original. It's a moment that many of the cast and crew, at one point, thought would never come.
The closing of one door brought the opening of another courtesy of Jeff Bezos, who dramatically saved the show less than a month after it was initially shelved. While the show still largely operates within the same budget under independent owner Alcon Entertainment, existing under the Amazon umbrella breathes a lot of new creative freedoms into the series: gone are the 43-minute runtime requirements that come with a cable network, or the finite limits on language, gore, or nudity that can detract from what some cast members call an authentic approach to the source material of The Expanse.
For many of the cast and crew, Amazon's acquisition of the show is a golden opportunity for The Expanse to tell a truer version of itself. The Expanse has always been quick to show the darker side of both tribalism and human nature, and showrunner Naren Shankar is keen to utilize the new tools at his disposal to show this to the best of his ability:
No knock on our previous partners in Syfy, but we died and went to heaven because the ability to tell the story without language restrictions, nudity [restrictions], run length, the idea of having all of these episodes drop at once – it does open up a lot of different ways to tell stuff that you just can’t do on broadcast or basic cable, and we’re exploiting all of those as much as we possibly can.
It won't take long for those exploits to bear fruit in the show's upcoming fourth season, where Naren sets the tone with some gory segments and Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Agdashloo) paving the way in terms of new language options with her character-trademark cussing. While that's more authentic to her character, the show takes care not to go overboard with such freedoms - veteran fans of the show will still see a very recognizable product as the characters find themselves in a blood-soaked gold rush in the upcoming season.
Wes Chatham - who plays Amos - will see his character encounter some kindred spirits in season four, with his story evolving in a manner that simply couldn't have happened on cable networks. The 41-year-old actor credits this crucial piece of character development to the fact that Amazon shows don't have to work around advertisements mid-episode, allowing for storylines to develop in a more natural way.
Being on broadcast television in general just has its challenges, because if you're trying to tell a story and the story wants to go somewhere that's honest and truthful, and there's a lot of edge to it, you've got to round those edges out on broadcast television. You've got to work till commercial, you've got the act breaks - five act breaks that go to the commercial and you have to time it in a specific way, and so you're not following the story, you're following guidelines for advertisement.
It won't take fans long to see the the immediate impact of these changes: each episode from the first half of season four all exceed the 43 minute time limit that is imposed by broadcast shows, with Wes Chatham stating viewers will experience episodes that feel more authentic to what The Expanse has been trying to show all along:
Being on Amazon, you can follow the story wherever it takes you, and it can beautiful, it can be ugly, it can be harsh, it can be violent, but you have to go through all of those to be able to express the story and have it live to its highest potential. Also, you're not really confined to time, in a way. It might take an hour to tell it this way, or it might take forty-five minutes. There's something from a creative perspective, it's like, the story is the most important thing. In broadcast television, there's a lot of other important things. [Being on Amazon], I love that. I love working like that. I don't know if I could go back to any other version of working.
Beyond the production-based freedoms, being an Amazon Original also delivers the show to the virtual doorsteps of countless consumers who may not have found out about the show otherwise. To that end, Chatham revealed that he's already run into several people while out and about in Toronto who have congratulated him on his 'new show', despite the fact that it's now entering its fourth season (and was renewed for a fifth, too). It's a great, if anecdotal, example of how a change in platforms can drastically expand the reach of a show.
The freedoms granted by Amazon, it seems, couldn't have come at a better time. Chatham firmly believes being on the streaming service will help the show reach an audience who otherwise may have been scared off by a show that stands under the sci-fi umbrella:
I do think that sci-fi is one part of it, but it transcends. If you think about the first Alien, it's a horror sci-fi movie, but it's really looking into morality, the right thing, the wrong thing, corporations and all this. If a story is done really well, it really transcends whatever that specific genre is. It uses that genre as a foundation to build the story off of, but ultimately at the end of the day you just want to tell the truth about human nature. If you do that, that connects the people, and I think The Expanse does that.
The entirety of season four is slated to drop on Amazon Prime Video this December 13, 2019, and while the cast members will no longer be able to join in on the episodic live-tweets that they used to do, Naren Shankar is confident that fans will enjoy seeing the cast pursue their new freedoms on-screen:
We’re doing brand new things and bigger things than we’ve never done before, so I think that’s certainly something that’s going to be a good thing for when we get on being an Original Amazon series in season four.
With the show's fifth season already in production and the book series approaching its ninth and final planned release, The Expanse is showing no signs of slowing down after surviving its near-death experience last year. While it still remains to be seen how the show ultimately fares as an Amazon Original, one thing appears certain: the television adaption of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck's written work appears to have benefited from the jump to Amazon. From our experiences with season four so far, this appears to be the case.