Q & A with Colony Executive Producer
Thom Beers

Question: As creator of The Colony, what was your overall goal for the experiment? 

Answer: This is the ultimate "off the grid" project. The premise of the series is "Can 10 strangers rebuild society in the wake of a global catastrophe?" The idea of The Colony was to create a well-thought-out, well-crafted environment and immerse a group of people into this believable scenario to see if they could function – and, in fact, thrive -- in that world and under that pressure. It was also important that viewers of The Colony learn something, so that anyone put in any survival situation, like an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, nuclear event, biological event, etc., could say, "I saw on the Discovery Channel that this can be done."

Q: How did you find and select the Colonists? 

Answer: We cast a very wide net, and word of mouth passed around very quickly. We wanted to find 10 really bright and interesting people from across the country who possessed a wide range of skills that would be complementary when put into a group situation. In the early stages we were looking for professors and engineers, so we spread the news among the college world. We also got lucky. Some people we met while casting other shows and found they had particular skills, like a doctor who was incredibly charismatic and I thought, "this would be a great experiment for him." And some people we found via everything from Craigslist to stories we read in newspapers. After narrowing down our search, we conducted intense interviews and profiles of each person before we settled on them. In the end, some were type A personalities, some were aggressive, some were passive.

Q: Why would people volunteer to be isolated from their families for two months? 

Answer: People chose to take part in The Colony for different reasons. One of the Colonists is an IBM lifetime scholar. This is a guy who had no interest in becoming a television or reality star. But what he had was a desire to shake his life up, after decades of teaching and a traumatic life event. And this experiment certainly shook up people’s lives. Ultimately, the most amazing thing is that after two months of living in absolute isolation in a grimy warehouse loaded with rats and pigeons and with no working bathrooms, if you had asked each of the Colonists if they would come back to the experiment, I think every one of them would have agreed to do it. It’s because they found something inside themselves. This was minimalist living that had no pressure from the outside world, and all they had to worry about was catching a fish out of the L.A. River, carrying enough water and keeping their mind agile by creating new technologies.