October 18th, 2023 
Jackson Murphy 
Max’s new adult animated series Scavengers Reign premieres this Thursday October 19th. It’s based on a 2016 short. Over the 12-episode season, you’ll witness what happens when the crew of the Demeter ship that has crash landed on a unique, distant planet tries to survive and escape. It’s a thorough, deep, gorgeous and emotionally effective series that shakes-up the ‘marooned’ genre. I recently spoke with its makers at New York Comic Con. (These interviews were combined and edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: I love the wide shots and the devotion you give to each set of characters. Timing is so key. How did you want to focus on that — that the timing felt right?
Sean Buckelew (Executive Producer): To me it was useful because I felt like in writing it, you could have these natural in and out points. You’ve got three disparate storylines you’re dealing with at any given moment. It allowed for… each arc to be simple, but then when you try to think about maybe all three climax at the same time, we tried to be like, “How could that thematically relate?” in what we want to build up to.
Joe Bennett (Co-Creator and Executive Director): A lot of it is, “What is the intention of this shot? How do you trim fat on something later on?” You can distill the significance of each thing as much as you can, even if it’s kind of ambiguous.
SB: And Benjy [Brooke], our supervising director, had a very big guiding principle of always coming in and out on each storyline with something exciting. The first shot and the last shot should always be a fun transition. I think that actually made our jobs easier. If you had to have this same show but it’s stuck with just one plotline, that would actually be more of a challenge. It was fun to have it be characters who aren’t aware of each other in completely separate places. It allowed for completely different storylines.
JM: I love the steady beat music and rhythm of it all. What do you want to have accomplished with the music on this show?
James Merrill (Executive Producer): That’s our friend Nicolas Snyder. He’s a complete savant genius composer that we love. The different departments all work together in conjunction. The writing room would be inspired by the artists’ work. The music is the third element of that. He would be working and sending us works in progress where we could suddenly see a path forward. We’re both music nerds. For “Scavengers”, I don’t know what he was pulling from other than, “It worked.” Whatever alchemy it was is incredible and inspiring. We were stunned.
Benjy Brooke [Supervising Director]: Similarly playing against type and playing against what the expectations of science fiction would be. It’s very subtle. It is a steady beat, but it’s a subtle treatment of the music soundscape that is a nice counterpoint to the subtle storytelling of the show. There’s a lot of beautiful themes that come from it. Each character has their own theme. They often interweave or weave as the characters are changing over the course of the season. A lot of sophisticated things Nic was doing that we were all inspired by.
JM: The best stories are the ones you can emotionally identify with. And I love how detailed the animation is on this show. What blows you about the detail work that goes into the close-ups and the wide shots?
BB: One thing that always surprises me is that when you let an artist spend an extra 10 or 12 hours or a whole week working on a single shot, the effect is subsconscious on the viewer. It adds this textural detail that gets lost in a lot of TV animation today. It’s why people love Miyazaki movies. There’s that care put into every single piece of animation. It’s always possible to do something simple, but if you put that extra effort in… it makes the audience feel like they’re looking at something that’s hitting on your cerebral cortex. It’s really satisfying to see.
J. Merill: We have a lot of designers and animators who are overachievers, too. One in particular, a board artist, we would throw sequences that are problematic and they would come back fully articulated, with super highly detailed backgrounds. Tons of poses for the character — spot-on character acting in animation. A lot of the credit goes to how talented our teams are.
JM: How does the journey — of this show and of making this show — speak to you?
J. Merill: Of making the show… you just have to give yourself to it. It really did feel special when we all came together. It felt like the right mixture and the right project and that it was unique. Everybody could stretch their talents probably to places they haven’t been before. Everybody who worked on this project completely gave themselves to it for 80 weeks — whatever the schedule was. It was a fun journey but it becomes your life. I’ve probably talked about “Scavengers” with Benjy for the past couple years.
BB: The challenge of making a show like this that’s so consuming… and the team you’re working with is all over the world… it was a round the clock production. I would go to sleep and wake up with messages in my inbox from the artists in Portugal, India and Korea. Constantly churning. Everybody was pushing themselves. You go in feeling one way about the project and you leave feeling altered forever by the experience of working with these people. It echoed completely the story of the show in every layer.
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