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From Earthlings to Martians…
Season 2 of National Geographic’s Mars portrays what life could really be like once we settle on the Red Planet. The acclaimed hybrid series, Executive Produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard returns, starting Sunday, 11 November 2018, with veteran show runner Dee Johnson, at the helm.
Expert ‘Big Thinkers’, including Elon Musk, Bill Nye, Ellen Stofan, Naomi Klein and Stephen Petranek, weigh in on the conflicts between science and industry as human’s terra-form this brave New World.
Season 2 of this acclaimed series, starting globally with a six-episode arc continuing in last season’s unique hybrid format: alternating scripted and documentary sequences to predict what life will be like on the Red Planet forecasted by what’s happening today on Earth.
National Geographic partners again with Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Michael Rosenberg of Imagine Entertainment, as well as co-creator and executive producer Justin Wilkes and executive producers Tommy Turtle and Jon Kamen of RadicalMedia, to envision what might happen when Earthlings become the planet’s first Martians.
This season on Mars, the story delves into the boundaries between science and industry on an isolated, unforgiving frontier. Throughout history, there’s been a constant tug of war between human motivations and interests with profitability on one end of the spectrum and exploration on the other. When becoming interplanetary, can humans break the chain, or are they doomed to repeat the same mistakes in this new world?
The Mars cast is comprised of returning actors from Season 1, along with several newcomers, including JiHAE from Mortal Engines, Jeff Hephner from Chicago Med and Code Black as well as Esai Morales who starred in Ozark and NYPD Blue.
On the documentary front, present-day vignettes draw parallels to the future happenings on Mars by looking at some of the dire issues facing Earth’s last frontier – the Arctic. This includes a spectrum of events that currently are compromising life on Earth and could plague us in the future, as we become an interplanetary species: drilling, glacial melting, rising sea level and indigenous health epidemics, which surface when the permafrost melts.
In Mars, everything as simple as the quotidian, like personal hygiene and meals, requires greater effort and is exponentially more difficult in this foreign frontier of limited resources, where new rules are often written on the fly, as Stephen Petranek, Mars’ co-executive producer, scientific advisor and Big Thinker elaborates. Leaving Earth insures long-term human survival, and we have the technology and spirit to get there, but what will it actually take to live there? Mars is a six-to-nine month trip one way…so before we get there, we better make sure we can permanently make it our own…
Directors Stephen Cragg, known for series such as Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder and Ashley Way of Doctor Who and Homeland, join returning director Everardo Gout of Days of Grace, for the second season.
Dee Johnson serves as the executive producer and show runner, with Taimi Arvidson and Meredith Kaulfers serving as supervising producers. Jen Isaacson is the co-producer.
