THE FEED Team on Adapting the Book for Television

Amazon’s newest series, THE FEED—which is now streaming—dives into the joy and danger of advancing technology.

Based on the Nick Clark Windo novel, THE FEED is set in a near-future world where humanity is connected, digitally, via an implant. The Feed allows people to connect instantly, with their minds, sharing conversations, music, thoughts, and even memories from afar.

At the center of the story is the Hatfield family, who were the architect of The Feed’s technology. Lawrence (David Thewlis) and Meredith (Michelle Fairley) run the company, while their son, Tom (Guy Burnet), is trying to go down his own path—and build a life and family with his wife Kate (Nina Toussaint-White).

“He separated himself from his family for most of his adult life,” Burnet notes. “He lives the kind of relatively simple life, even though his family are these wealthy technology builders. And he doesn’t want to be dragged back in with family until he doesn’t really have a choice. Then it’s a conflict: I don’t want to be involved with my family, but I have to be for the protection of my new little family. I don’t have a choice here.”

But in the book, things go awry very fast. When it came to adapting the story for television, executive producer Channing Powell decided to take a different route.

“The first season of the show is really only the first chapter of the book—and then a few flashbacks that are woven throughout the book,” she says. “I just thought the world that they presented in that first chapter of the book was so interesting on its own, and so different to anything I felt like I had seen on television, but also very relatable and…that world was the near future. So I wanted to explore that world a little bit more before going into the rest of the book.”

It helped that by making the first season, essentially, a prequel, it extended the potential life of the series. “That appealed to the network,” she said with a laugh. “And we went from there. But it was difficult because I was having to invent a lot of things that weren’t actually in the book, knowing that I would need to build into the events that were happening in the book.”

For Burnet—who bought the book after reading the script, before he even booked the role—having the extra insight was vital. “In this instance, because the world was different from our own, I needed to know,” he notes. “For example, [when the characters are using] The Feed, this technology I am seeing through my eyes, it is a Feed POV. When we’re shooting it, we have no idea how the VFX will come across, so we had to create it in our minds.”

“I needed to know what this world is like, inside and out, so that I know when they’re shooting it, I know what I’m looking at when they cut back to me,” he continues. “I wanted a rough understanding of what it would be. After the first ten pages, it’s a [different world], so there was only so much I could decipher from the page to bring into the character on the show.”

And while the series does dive into futuristic tech, there is a human core. “I enjoyed the grounded elements of this psychological thriller rather than [it being] complete science-fiction,” Burnet praises.

THE FEED, Now Streaming, Amazon

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