Novelist Turned Showrunner Blake Crouch Dives into the Sci-Fi Realm of 'Dark Matter'

Novelist André Aciman once wrote that we can have many pasts: “For every life we live, there are at least eight others we’ve gotten close to but may never know.”

College physics professor Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) encounters several in the Apple TV+ sci-fi series Dark Matter, recently renewed for a second season. The happily married Chicago resident finds himself plucked from his cozy life one night after an alternate version of himself, curious about his own path not taken, abducts Jason and takes his place.

Dark Matter is itself living another life on streaming, having started as a 2016 best-selling novel. While the story explores principles of quantum mechanics—i.e., how any choices we make splinter into parallel universes—its original inspiration came from that timeless muse: wondering, “What if?”

“I was … starting to have some of those introspective moments, looking back at my life, [where you] take stock of your choices, how you ended up where you are,” said the book’s author and series showrunner Blake Crouch. “I was just feeling very reflective and wanted to write something that allowed me to explore my feelings about the choices I had made in a kind of oblique way.”

The series holds an 83% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics and audiences liking both the mind-bending plot and the performances from Edgerton (The Boys in the Boat), Jennifer Connelly (Top Gun: Maverick) as Jason’s wife, Daniela, and the supporting cast, which includes Alice Braga (A Murder at the End of the World) and Jimmi Simpson (Pachinko).

Here, Crouch shared some challenges and rewards in adapting his own work.

Screenwriting Through Wayward Pines

A North Carolina native, Crouch has written multiple novels and short stories. He gained screenwriting experience on the acclaimed mystery/horror TV series Wayward Pines (2015–2016), based on his trilogy. He wrote three episodes and served as a consulting producer and executive producer.

Next came the crime drama series Good Behavior (2016–2017), based on his novellas about a thief angling to burglarize luxury hotel suites who stumbles into more than she anticipated. He wrote a couple of episodes, but Chad Hodge, who had developed Wayward Pines for television, was the showrunner.

When Apple and Sony Pictures Television expressed interest in Dark Matter, “I knew that I wanted to be an uber control freak and be involved in every aspect of it,” he said. “I just couldn't imagine a world where someone else came in and messed it up. If anyone messed it up, it was going to be me.”

Dark Matter draws on the “weird and compelling” idea in quantum mechanics that anything that can happen will happen, even at the level of subatomic particles: “If you scale up that idea, then any choice that we’re presented with, [whether] we make the right choice, the wrong choice, a different choice, there are infinite numbers of tiny moments in every day, just branching out in front of us into different worlds.”

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Understandably, the daily responsibilities of running a TV series don’t allow for multiple choices. “The definition of the job of showrunner is to make decisions,” he said. “You have to make them as quickly as possible so that all the people who are working with you can go build the things they have to build, or find the wardrobes they have to find.… There were very few moments of real indecision and, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this cannot get [messed] up.’”

However, he and the other creatives still found places to brainstorm, such as the production design and the performances.

In the show, the original Jason awakens in a laboratory after being kidnapped and eventually pieces together that he’s in an alternate timeline. Here, he didn’t marry Daniela and have a teenage son, Charlie (Oakes Fegley, The Fabelmans). Rather, this Jason, a.k.a. Jason2, is a world-renowned physicist who constructed the means to travel across dimensions via a metal black box roughly the size of a bank vault.

While Jason2 awkwardly tries to fit into Daniela’s and Charlie’s lives, original Jason journeys inside the box to reunite with them. The box’s interior expands like a labyrinth, with doors leading to yet more lives where the choices impact other Jasons, drawing their ire or support.

“In some ways, the box is the most important character and the lead actor in the show,” Crouch said, noting how the show’s main titles depict the box assembling like a puzzle, sending tiny figures along different routes. “I knew that everyone who loved the book and was curious about the show would have an image in their mind of what the box would look like.”

The challenge was, “How do you give a heightened sense of it visually, but also don’t … make it so weird that people are like, ‘Oh, that’s not what I have in my mind’?” After months of discussions and prep with production designer Patricio Farrell, they arrived at something that Crouch felt was true to what was in the novel but also camera-friendly. “The big fear was … black boxes are not inherently interesting objects to look at, and it would be a letdown.”

“A Show Where the Devil Is in the Details”

Crouch credited the show’s script coordinators with maintaining continuity for the cast and crew as well as the viewers. Each revision in the script required updating files of timelines, characters, and worlds.

“It’s a show where the devil is in the details,” he said. “We have scenes between Jason41 and Jason32, and the costumes tell the stories of where they’ve come from. And the makeup and the hair. All of it is storytelling in a really important way, which is one of the reasons we invited so much of our crew back for season two. These people are the keepers of this knowledge, and it’s a very hard show to get up to speed on.”

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He also was grateful to the actors for their suggestions as Dark Matter took shape.

“Good actors care a lot and want to make sure that everything the character does tracks motivationally,” he said. “We had a lot of conversations and a lot of cool moments of them bringing things to the table, some of which were just phenomenal ideas that made the show better.”

Empathetic Characters Ground Any Story

Crouch is developing another project with Hodge, an adaptation of Crouch’s 2010 novel Famous, a thriller about a man often mistaken for a Hollywood star who decides to use this to his advantage.

Regardless of genre or plot twists, he likes empathetic characters that keep audiences intrigued. As one review noted, Jason’s quest to reach his family is the “emotional hook” behind Dark Matter’s “wild roller coaster ride.”

“What makes stories compelling isn’t really anything other than making the audience care about the characters. Whether you’re writing a script or a novel or a short story, you just have to make the audience care about the characters. That’s really all that matters,” Crouch said.

Meanwhile, as Dark Matter evolves, he aims to balance the creative process with the audience’s expectations.

“I don’t want people who loved the book to be like, ‘They really messed up that adaptation. And the novelist himself ruined it.’ That would have been brutal. I’m sure there are people who didn’t like it. And, you know, you can’t make everyone happy,” he said. “You do have to sort of close the door and just … make yourself happy, first and foremost. Make something that you’re proud of.”

Dark Matter Season One is streaming exclusively on AppleTV+.