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Manhattan

The 2015 New York Television Festival kicked off last night with a special event highlighting one of Decider’s favorite shows, Manhattan, and attendees were treated to a special screening of tonight’s brand-new episode. It’s a gloriously intense chapter that explains what happened to John Benjamin Hickey‘s Dr. Frank Winter and features a dynamite guest star turn from Justin Kirk.

After the screening, members of the cast (including Hickey, Ashley Zuckerman, Rachel Brosnahan, Katja Herbers, Michael Chernus, and new Season
Two addition Mamie Gummer) joined showrunner Sam Shaw and executive producer Thomas Schlamme for a talk-back session. Topics ranged from everything to the genesis of the project — Shaw first worked on a pilot about the contemporary war on terror, but felt drawn to the backdrop of the Manhattan Project — to whether or not the Australian Zuckerman and Dutch Herbers thought working in American television beat working abroad. (Hint: it did.)

The most amusing segment of the night came when one intrepid audience member asked every single actor on stage how they got their start in show business. Everyone in the cast sheepishly said, “Drama school,” until Mamie Gummer quipped, “C-section” (Gummer happens to be the eldest daughter of Meryl Streep), which made the audience explode into laughter. Chernus followed that up by recounting how he started his career as Gandalf in middle school production of The Hobbit. “Once you do that, you can never go back,” he deadpanned.

We got a chance after the event to chat with showrunner Sam Shaw about a quiet, yet electrifying, scene in last week’s season premiere. The moment involves a pregnant Abby Isaacs (Brosnahan) confronting Dr. Helen Prins (Herbers). Even though the two could have had it out again over the fact that they’re both in love with Dr. Charlie Isaacs (Zuckerman), the scene is instead a chance for two women in the 1940s to discuss the pros and cons of getting an abortion. Helen had one years earlier to continue her career in science, and Abby is considering getting one to get out of her unhappy marriage. As it turns out, Shaw himself wrote the scene, and he explained its inspiration:

I’m a feminist, and and I think the show is kind of in its way a “crypto feminist” show. But part of it was how can there be a scene about these two women who share this man — and it’s really not about him at all — and is fundamentally about just this world that they both inhabit and they’re both aware of what the limitations and the realities of it are. Can they find something together that is a moment of connection. Even if it is fragile and they lose it?

You could say that all of Manhattan is about disparate souls trying to connect under the specter of war-time secrecy. You can can find out where to stream last weeks episode by clicking here. The first season of Manhattan is available to stream on Hulu. In the meantime, get to know who’s who on the series, and watch the clip below to see the cast gush about which of their colleagues is actually the smartest.

An all-new episode of Manhattan airs tonight at 9/8 C on WGN America.

[Watch Season 1 of Manhattan on Hulu]

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Photo: WGN America