Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie on “Limetown”

Limetown started as a breakout fiction podcast in 2015, centered on the story of a city of scientists who went missing ten years before the start of the podcast’s fictional investigation. Created by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, who have since launched Two-Up Productions, the podcast has been adapted into a prequel novel and, now, a Facebook Watch Original series. I spoke with Akers and Bronkie leading up to the premier of the Facebook Watch series’ first season finale, which premiers today.

Akers and Bronkie met at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where they were roommates–but before Limetown, the only project they collaborated on was a student film. After graduation, Akers went on to make sports documentaries with HBO; Bronkie worked at Facebook and Pinterest. It’s a strange path to eventually land on a sci-fi-meets-conspiracy fiction podcast, but the two creators found inspiration from their paths in different ways.

“Documentary is a good discipline for storytelling and filmmaking, generally,” Akers said. “How do you construct a story using the facts, and the facts alone in a way that’s entertaining and engaging? When I was in film school, early on, I didn’t have any interest in the discipline of documentary because I wanted to work completely in narrative. But, of course, the real world is a really fascinating place. Documentary is a great way to access it and convey it to an audience.”

In previous interviews, Bronkie has mentioned that some of the inspiration for Limetown’s concept came from Silicon Valley, namely the Facebook campus. Now, with the TV adaptation of Limetown, Bronkie has returned to Facebook to work with their Facebook Watch team. “When we pitched the show out in 2017, Facebook was the partner who wanted to go straight to series, and Facebook was the partner who also shared our creative vision. When I was at Facebook back in 2005, I remember thinking, ‘There’s no way Facebook would ever do original content.’”

But for fans of Limetown, the series isn’t just about the concept, the setup, or the town itself; it’s also about the rich cast of characters who develop via semi-monologue in each episode. Akers and Bronkie say that their inspiration was pulled for the characters on the page versus drawing from personal experiences–which put Bronkie at ease to hear. Referencing the character Lenore from late in the podcast and show’s first season he said, “Lenore is someone that I can see come from some deep, dark place inside of [Akers], and I’ve almost always been too afraid to ask.”

“Lenore is my favorite character to write,” Akers answered. “I got a chance to write her again for the TV show, which you’ll see in episode 10. She’s so delicious to write for.”

This did not seem to ease Bronkie’s worries.

While Akers feels a connection to the terrifying Lenore, Bronkie says he resonates with the love story at the core of Max Finlayson and DeirdreWells’s narratives, written by Dan Moyer. Akers and Bronkie explained that for each episode of the podcast’s first series, the writers were given a starting point and a destination, but were otherwise largely left to their own devices. When asked about the references to The Wizard of Oz in the Deirdreand Max episodes, Akers said, “I think that was [Moyer] just processing the story of Limetown and spitting out something beautiful.”

There’s a sense of cinema throughout the first season of Limetown, both in references like The Wizard of Oz and the storytelling itself, that has always made Limetown feel ripe for adaptation. Because Akers and Bronkie come from a film background, Akers said that writing the pilot almost felt like a relief. “Writing for podcasts is really hard, and writing for TV is really hard. They just both present different challenges.” 

On adapting the podcast for TV, Bronkie said, “I often forget how much time Zack [Akers] and I have been living in this world. Even at its start in the writers’ room in 2017, that’s five years after we started talking about Limetown. We deeply know this world and these characters, and that was important in thinking about how to tell this story visually in television.”

Akers explains that the biggest challenge he had was building out the protagonist, Lia Haddock. In the podcast, he said, “She wants to present herself in a very professional way and a very particular way. In the TV show, you have to drop that and show who she really is away from the edit lab.” Some of the inspiration for Lia’s iteration came from bringing lead actor Jessica Biel on and working with her on Lia’s character.

Fans of the podcast who have been keeping up with the season on Facebook Watch will have noticed the changes in Lia’s character. In the podcast, Lia is almost a blank slate, there to give some structure and framing in the story; in the Facebook Watch show, Lia is a fully-realized character who is driven by her obsession with the story she’s trying to tell.

Limetown, in all of its iterations, is a story focused on the importance of the truth. When I asked whether the creators thought that Lia’s quest for the truth is noble, their answers reflected the tricky territory of the price truth can have.

Akers answered, “I don’t think of [Lia] as a noble character. Skip [Bronkie] says she’s a character who lives in the gray [. . .] she’s always burning those lines, and that’s what makes her interesting to me. When I’m thinking about how she would handle a situation, she’s constantly surprising me. But her pursuit being noble is a separate issue.”

Bronkie answered, “I think there’s an interesting distinction between the people in the world who pursue a mystery because they want to uncover the truth and the people who pursue a mystery because they want to be the one to uncover the truth. One of the great things we explore in this season of [the Facebook Watch show] is, what if [Lia] is the latter? What if she’s someone who finds purpose in this mission, and she pursues the truth because she wants to be the one to uncover the truth? And I think that you could decide for yourself if that’s noble, but it’s certainly something we’ve made a choice to explore.”