‘World on Fire’ Creator Peter Bowker on Shaking Up His War Drama in Season 2: ‘We Can Do So Much More’ Than Show the ‘White European Perspective’
variety.comManori Ravindran Executive Editor of International When “World on Fire” premiered on the BBC in September 2019, no one could have known that the World War II drama would be one of the last major scripted debuts on the public broadcaster before the pandemic.
The PBS Masterpiece co-production — which follows the interconnected lives of British and European families during the outbreak of war — confirmed it would return at the end of its Season 1 finale, but the onset of the COVID-19 crisis just four months later and its impact on global production made the prospect of setting up a continent-spanning war drama all the more unlikely.
Yet with some heroic scheduling, rewritten scripts and clever location and CGI combos, Season 2 returned to British screens on Sunday after a four-year hiatus, premiering to an audience indelibly changed by a global and life-altering event of their own. “I wrote the bulk of the first two episodes during lockdown, and suddenly, this feeling didn’t seem so far away,” the show’s writer, Peter Bowker, tells Variety. “It feels like we have a better understood connection with what it feels like to be both very tiny in this world, but very much part of a connected world.” Season 1 was led by Helen Hunt, Sean Bean, Lesley Manville, and a then little-known Jonah Hauer-King.
The British actor had played Laurie alongside Maya Hawke in the BBC’s 2017 “Little Women” adaptation, but received global attention when he was cast as Prince Eric in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” just as “World on Fire” was ending.
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