Ridley Scott is best known as the director behind iconic films like Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, The Martian, and many more, but he’s also been involved in several television projects over the years.
You might expect to see his name in the credits of shows like Alien: Earth and the upcoming Blade Runner 2099 since they’re based on his movies. You would be right. But he has also served as a producer on series like The Andromeda Strain, The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and The Pillars of the Earth.
Scott is also an executive producer on The Terror, an anthology horror series that premiered on AMC in 2018. The first season of The Terror is based on the book of the same name by Dan Simmons, about a daring 1845 expedition into the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. It also happens to have one perfect season.
‘The Terror’ Never Topped Its First Season
The Terror is one of Ridley Scott’s best projects. In Season 1, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror get stuck amidst the immovable Arctic ice, and all the sailors can do is wait for a thaw. Already bedeviled by scurvy, starvation, lead poisoning, and extreme cold, the sailors soon realize there’s something even worse out there on the ice.
Its success starts with the performers. Jared Harris (Chernobyl, Mad Men), Tobias Menzies (Rome, Game of Thrones), and Ciarán Hinds (Belfast, Zack Snyder’s Justice League) lead the cast as officers trying to hold things together as the situation becomes increasingly dire. The show takes its time before its terrifying reveals, allowing the actors to get the most out of the material.
The atmosphere of The Terror is unfailingly grim and as suffocating as anything from a horror movie. The series shows admirable restraint when it comes to the monster, and we only see glimpses.
It’s also a superior adaptation of the book, shedding some of the more questionable subplots and fleshing out characters like the Netsilik woman Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen), who is entirely mute in the novel but speaks in the series.
After the success of the first season of The Terror, the series returned the following year with Season 2, Infamy, set in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II. This second season has its charms, but overall, it’s a step down from the first. After a long break, Season 3 premiered in May 2026 and is called Devil in Silver. Based on the 2012 book by Victor LaValle, the third season is about a man (Dan Stevens) who is unjustly committed to a haunted psychiatric facility.
Critics liked Devil in Silver more than Infamy, but audiences were less impressed, and neither one made the splash that the first one did. The Terror suffers from the same problem that plagues HBO’s anthology series True Detective, where the first season is so good that everything that comes after can’t help but feel underwhelming.
Producer David W. Zucker said that there are plans for a fourth season of The Terror, although we haven’t heard many details yet. In the meantime, the first season will always be there, and it set the bar impossibly high.
Regardless of the show’s future, Ridley Scott should be very proud of his involvement, as should Season 1’s co-showrunners David Kajganich and Soo Hugh.
- Release Date
-
2018 – 2026-00-00
- Network
-
AMC, Shudder, AMC+
- Directors
-
Tim Mielants, Edward Berger, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Fred Toye, Karyn Kusama, Michael Lehmann, Josef Kubota Wladyka, Lily Mariye, Toa Fraser, Meera Menon
- Writers
-
David Kajganich, Shannon Goss, Tony Tost, Steven Hanna, Andres Fischer-Centeno, Benjamin Endsley Klein, Danielle Roderick, Alessandra DiMona, Josh Parkinson
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
