How ‘The 100’ Became One Of The Darkest And Most Dangerous Shows On TV

Last week we told you that it’s time to get hip to The 100. The gritty and grimy dystopian soap has been pushing outrageous boundaries in its first two seasons. It returns for a third season tonight at 9 PM on The CW and we wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be its breakout season. But how did it become one of the darkest and most challenging shows on television?

Let’s go back to the beginning for a moment. The 100 debuted on The CW during the 2013-2014 midseason and it was a hot time for dystopian YA adaptations. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire had just scorched the fall box office and the first Divergent was hitting theaters. So author Kass Morgan’s moody look at what happens when a bunch of teen delinquents are sent as guinea pigs to the surface of a post-nuclear earth looked at first to be just the latest project to ride the YA boom’s coattails. After all, it focused on a “special” girl named Clarke (Eliza Taylor), as beautiful as she was smart, as moody as she was tenacious, who was determined to save her civilization. She had a built-in love triangle and a sneering antagonist or two. However, The 100 soon proved it was anything but another YA cliché. So how did it buck the odds?

During the CW’s panel at TCA last week, The 100‘s showrunner Jason Rothenberg said, “I try to come up with scenarios that are so hard, in terms of the choice that a character has to make, that there’s no good choice.” So what usually happens? People die. Not just background extras, but leading characters. Oftentimes, children are the ones whose lives are extinguished. Sometimes, children are the killers themselves.

One of The 100‘s most eye-raising storylines — and there are many — happens early in the first season. A little girl suffering from night terrors stabs a teen in the neck. When the older kids can’t decide whether or not they should execute her for her crime, she walks off a cliff so that justice can be served without anyone feeling guilty about it. THAT is what The 100 is like, my friends. It’s not game-makers and wistful trysts. It’s children committing murder and then committing suicide to make a point about morality. It only gets stickier from there…

The 100′s swift slide from typical YA fare to downright nihilistic fun reflected The CW’s own rapid recalibration. The network was once known primarily for it’s “B-entertainment,” but now it’s one of the few major networks daring to challenge its audience with ground-breaking comedies, diverse casts, and audacious storytelling. Even its banner superhero shows Arrow, The Flash, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow exist in their own special bubble: “The Arrowverse.” No other network has managed to spin out such an expansive fantasy universe in such a small space of time. Netflix might be able to catch up in time with its Marvel’s Defenders series (i.e. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc.), but the Arrowverse is streets ahead in terms of complex superhero storytelling on TV.

When asked if he ever felt pushback from The CW on The 100‘s themes, Rothenberg told the TCA crowd this: “We didn’t really find what the show was going to be until around episode 4…We were being told [by the network] ‘You can make it dark, you can make it dark!’ But it was a little bit of a different time at the network, and you know, whether that’s really what they want or not is always a question.”

Turns out when The CW wanted it dark, they meant pitch black. And so, here we are, on the cusp of The 100‘s third season girding our loins for whatever moral quandary pops up next. Who will live? Who will die? What does it all mean? The 100 is a show that makes its audience asks these questions because The 100 is a show that doesn’t think its viewers need to be comforted or coddled. No longer content to just be a show for “teens who like fantasy,” it’s a complicated saga about the shaky foundations of societies. We meet different tribes, different factions, and different families all bent on thriving by any means necessary. The 100 is a show that can only exist in this “Golden Age” of television because it never would have been pushed to these limits in the days before challenging TV built to be binged.

The 100 returns to The CW tonight at 9 PM ET. Good news for cord cutters: You can stream the brand new episode on Hulu tomorrow on January 22nd.

[Watch Seasons 1 & 2 of The 100 on Netflix]