Related: Complete Coverage of TCA Summer Press Tour
Beverly Hills, Calif. -- WGN America’s Manhattan is more than a history lesson.
“What we’re actually doing very, very intelligently actually, is proposing a possible parallel to history,” said Manhattan star Ashley Zukerman, during the show’s TCA summer panel Wednesday.
Season two of the critically acclaimed show focuses on the Trinity test, the U.S. Air Force’s detonation of a plutonium bomb outside of New Mexico in 1945. And while there is basic information about the test and Los Alamos, there is much more that is unknown, allowing series creatives to play with historical facts.
“It felt a little bit like a show with a trick up its sleeve from the beginning, which it presents itself as a show about WWII…,” said Sam Shaw, creator, writer and executive producer of Manhattan. “But I was always much more interested in the question of what came next, what became.”
The network also trumpeted two new scripted series Outsiders, about an outlaw family in Appalachia, and Underground, following a group of slaves who plan an escape from a Georgia plantation, and Underground, which will bow on the network in 2016.
“I like that when you turn to WGN America, you are taken somewhere,” WGN America president and general manager Matt Cherniss told B&C last year. “I feel like that’s something that I find in the shows I like best.”
