You may not recognize their names immediately, but if you’ve been a regular television watcher the past 15 years you’ve likely seen the work of Brian Peterson and Kelly Souders. They rose from writers to executive producers on “Smallville” and have produced and written for programs such as “Political Animals,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Under the Dome” and “Salem.” Most recently they were consulting producers on the first two seasons of NatGeo’s “Genius.” Now, they have reunited with the new Disney network for “The Hot Zone,” a six-episode mini-series based on the best-selling non-fiction novel by Richard Preston which screens over three nights beginning Monday, May 27 at 9 PM.
Published in 1994, the novel depicts what happened when a U.S. government facility discovered a mutated version of the Ebola virus for the first time on U.S. soil. Leading the discovery and the battle to quarantine it was Dr. Nancy Jaax (Julianna Margulies) and, eventually, Wade Carter (Liam Cunningham), a researcher who had encountered Ebola in Africa. There had been attempts to adapt the story to the big screen for decades, but it took a take from Peterson and Sounders to finally get it on the small screen.
The duo joined the Four Quadrant podcast to discuss the difficulties in adapting something where the drama involves so much scientific jargon for a viewing audience, the contributions of stars such as Margulies and Cunningham, shooting in South Africa and those clunky but authentic safety suits.
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