Syfy's 'Incorporated' envisions dark, dangerous corporate future

Syfy's “Incorporated” offers a taste of how dangerous the business world could become.

With Oscar winners and close pals Matt Damon and Ben Affleck among its executive producers, the Syfy series — premiering Wednesday, Nov. 30 — pictures a near future in which standing out to get ahead can prove hazardous to your health. Sean Teale stars as Ben Larson, a seemingly obedient employee with an agenda for rising through the ranks at Spiga Biotech, where security chief Julian (Dennis Haysbert) is determined not to let anyone bring harm to the firm. Allison Miller plays Ben's wife Laura, the daughter of Spiga's demanding U.S. chief (Julia Ormond).

“Incorporated” was created by siblings Alex and David Pastor. “We always envisioned this show as an extreme version of our reality,” Alex explains. “We like the science fiction that holds a mirror to our society and shows the things that are going on right now in a distorted, satirical way. In this case, corporations in our show have the right to make their own laws and treat their employees however they see fit ... and even to torture them or execute them.”

In playing someone who isn't as he seems, Teale relates the themes of “Incorporated” to current times in his native England, particularly where the controversial Brexit movement is concerned. “Hopefully, humanity wins, and that's the benefit of a show like this,” he reasons, “(to depict) that within that power, within that danger and with that sort of gross injustice from the 99 percent losing out to the one, there's humanity within there.”

Haysbert also sees real-world relevance in “Incorporated.”

“I have children, so I am constantly worried about what kind of world they're going to inherit,” he says. “And the things I've seen over the last six months to a year, it seems that the intolerance of people against other people is growing and growing. And the thing is, this is not anything that's changed. This has been going on for years. And what we're doing now is (that) we're just sort of pulling back the veil.”

“Incorporated” initially was developed with an eye toward the big screen. “Suddenly, having 10 hours ahead of you — hopefully, multiple seasons, fingers crossed — it allows you to explore this world that you're creating much more in-depth and go for the little details, the side stories that a movie doesn't allow you to tell,” Alex Pastor notes. “When we wrote it for the first time, we had a treatment where the first three or four pages were just world description about rules and about how the corporations work, and the division between Green Zones and Red Zones, and how people go from one side to the other.

“Our manager said, ‘You're never going to be able to (fit) this into a movie. Have you thought about turning it into a TV show?' And that's when it clicked.”