Creator Jesse McKeown built 'Below' around a premise easy to sum up in a sentence, a sea creature terrorizing a small town, and explains how he kept that pitch from overshadowing the family drama and economic unraveling he actually wanted to tell. Having spent years visiting Newfoundland and growing attached to it long before cameras rolled, he talks through the strange task of shooting the place he loves in a way meant to feel threatening and dread soaked on screen.

Jesse walks us through how he and his crew worked to avoid the flattened, gray-blue look often applied to coastal or remote settings, aiming instead for something textured and alive. He set the story during a Come Home Year, a real Newfoundland tradition that pulls former residents back into town, giving him a built-in way to stage friction between people who stuck around through hard times and those returning from elsewhere.

Jesse also reflects on premiering the opening episodes at TIFF on a massive cinema screen, even though the show was conceived for television, and how designing for home viewing shaped his choices around both open water sequences and tighter interior scenes. At its core, he frames the show's real threat as change itself, a community watching its industry and way of life slip away, and considers how his own years navigating a constantly shifting television business fed into how he wrote these characters reacting to losing theirs.

(Photo: Courtesy of Netflix)