When Olen Steinhauer and his wife were passing through Berlin last year, she had one request — find a way for them to spend more time there.
Steinhauer, a modern master of spy fiction (The Tourist, The Cairo Affair) who is often compared to John le Carré, turned to what he knows best — storytelling — and ultimately conceived Berlin Station.
The ten-part contemporary espionage series, produced by Paramount TV and Anonymous Content and premiering on Epix October 16, tells of an analyst–turned–field agent, Daniel Miller (Richard Armitage), sent to Berlin's CIA station to unearth an Edward Snowden–like whistle blower whose bombshell leaks are devastating operations.
"Television is the ideal medium for creating worlds and the characters who inhabit them," says Steinhauer, who wrote the pilot on spec and pitched it to Epix with the support of Jocelyn Diaz, executive vice-president for original programming.
But the pitch would be the easy part. Despite having penned ten novels in twelve years, Steinhauer found scriptwriting challenging. "Everything is external in scripts," he says. "Everything about a character has to have some sort of visual expression. And pacing is enormously important. Everybody knows that most intelligence work is paperwork, but sometimes you have to amp it up."
Once he got it, Steinhauer, a creator–executive producer on the series, found that he could write much faster for the screen. Berlin Station transitions smoothly between Jason Bourne–like chase sequences and quieter considerations of characters and motive. "What's interesting about spying," he observes, "is the effect it has on the individuals who do the spying."
Showrunner–executive producer Brad Winters, who has written for FX's The Americans, agrees. "The espionage genre lends itself to metaphor," he says. "It is a meditation on the masks we wear and the many underlayers of our individual realities. There's so much more to mine in the genre than the actual spy story. Berlin Station tries to put the characters — and the lives of those characters — first."
Steinhauer has since written a screenplay based on his novel All the Old Knives and is working on a new novel, about homegrown American terrorism.
"There is little in the way of solitude in the process [of television]," he notes. "You're in conversation with others from the get-go. On the other hand, collaboration brings a lot of new things to the table, new ideas I might never have thought of on my own."
Fortunately for both viewers and readers, he doesn't have to choose.
