The 100 producer Jason Rothenberg breaks down the show’s new season
The CW’s The 100 is a bit of a Trojan horse as far as television shows go. It invites viewers in with the promise of post-apocalyptic YA action-adventure, then sneaks in impossible moral conundrums, built around a simple thesis: “Who we are and who we need to be to survive are very different.” The show is set 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse, as the descendants of survivors living aboard a clutch of international orbital stations learn that their home is running out of oxygen. The human race is headed for extinction if they can’t move back to Earth. So to determine whether the planet is survivable, they send down their most dispensable population, their juvenile offenders.
The good news is that Earth is survivable. The bad news is...