‘Condor’ EP Jason Smilovic On “Watershed Moment” America Is In

Approached by MGM Television and Skydance Television for a television adaptation of Sydney Pollack’s classic thriller Three Days of the Condor, Jason Smilovic and Todd Katzberg initially were reluctant to do so, finding the notion of adapting the film sacrilegious. But looking at the film more closely, the producers realized that the movie was overflowing with potential and ripe for a TV adaptation.

Broadcast on the Audience Network, the EP’s take on the material would become known as Condor. The series centers on bright, young CIA analyst Joe Turner (Max Irons), an idealist hoping to foster reform within the CIA, who finds his values challenged when the agency uses his own ingenious ideas for their own ends.

“I think the reason that we were mainly interested in telling this story is because we feel like we’re at a watershed moment in U.S. history where we are either going to go the right way or the wrong way,” Smilovic said, sitting down at Deadline’s South by Studio with Katzberg, Irons and co-star Leem Lubany. “We felt that this show had the right DNA for telling that story.”

In studio, Irons expanded on the EP’s comments and the core ideas the series explores. “We take certain luxuries for granted in the way we live these days. We have cheap gas in our cars, we can get cheap, disposable clothing, constantly in-season food, but we often turn away from the realities that allow us to have these luxuries,” Irons said. “I think our show makes us examine the things that we look away from in order to live the way we do.”