This was during the height of the pandemic, when the world was in lockdown and people were taking stock. But while some opted to bake bread or binge on , López, who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie novels, did the “one thing that scared me my entire life, writing and directing a whodunnit, because it’s a genre that inhabited my childhood obsessions”. Moreover, she took a deep dive into “all the unsolved mysteries that, when I was a kid, would obsess me, like spontaneous combustion.
” One mystery had always nagged her. Known as the Dyatlov Pass incident, it revolved around the unsolved deaths of nine Soviet hikers in the Ural mountains in 1959. “The details don’t make sense and they died in the ice.
So, I thought, ‘Murder mystery, ice, the unexplainable demise of a group of people.’ I put it aside, stopped thinking about it, because that’s what you do with ideas. You find the ingredients, then walk away.
” Four or five weeks later, however, López got a call from HBO asking if she was interested in taking over as showrunner on , the anthology crime drama created by Nic Pizzolatto. “I thought, ‘What an extraordinary idea.’ I love that first season and wanted to experience again this feeling of a perverse undercurrent on the edges of America.
” Suddenly that murder mystery set in the ice had a home. “All I needed was everything else. The story, characters, what happened to these men.
” The first season of took place in Loui.
