“What Sheriff Cortez also represents to me is the fundamentally terrifying distortions of a person that becomes convinced that they’re acting for good or that they are good,” Oliver continues. Sheriff Cortez (Enrique Murciano), for example, rationalizes bad behavior, including gambling on the games of panic.Ĭreating an antagonist who is also a law enforcement officer answered some book readers’ questions about how the game could go on year after year without police involvement, but also, “it did come out of topical events,” Oliver says, referring to current cultural conversations around the corruption and need for reform in such departments. “Like many things in ‘Panic,’ it’s a way to physically pin it onto an object - the same way that they pin fears they believe onto these challenges, while avoiding facing the deeper meaning behind them,” Oliver says. (She wants to earn enough money to get out of town.) She moved up the moment where Heather’s mother steals her savings to the front of the show to help establish Heather’s motive for entering the game. “The way that it was in the book, it makes it seem like literally she did it because she was dumped,” Oliver explains. Heather, Oliver notes was “full of quiet and inherited self-loathing” in the book, which wouldn’t translate exactly on screen. Many larger character and plot points were changed in the adaptation process, as well, including why Heather (Olivia Welch) joined the game in the first place, and who really needed to be punished in the end. Small differences between the page and screen versions include everything from the location (Carp, N.Y., in the novel, but Carp, Texas, in the show) to the amount of the game winnings ($67,000 in the novel, but only $50,000 in the show: “I did a calculation - a look at the towns around where we were and thought about how big the high school could be and added up $1/day,” she reveals). “I literally have a document with everything that happened in the town from 1989 on,” she says. She penned “reams and reams of backstory and thoughts” on even the tertiary characters while adapting her novel.

Panic oliver