If you think 20,000 leagues under the sea is a trek, wait until you hear about how long Nautilus has been lurking beneath the surface.

“We started working on the pitch in 2019, but it actually went quite quickly,” explains executive producer Xander Marchand of the lavish origin story of Jules Verne’s iconic Captain Nemo (Shazad Latif). “We pitched it to the world in 2020,” he continues, and after Disney+ announced that they had picked up the project, “we started prep at the end of 2021. We shot the whole series — it was a big shoot, it’s 10 episodes with lots of VFX, but we shot the whole of 2022 and then it was a big post-production process. We had about 4,000 VFX shots in the show. So the show was actually finished right at the beginning of 2024.”

By then, however, Disney+ had bailed on the completed series and it looked like Nautilus was sunk. Unexpectedly, AMC swooped in and acquired the North American broadcast rights, with Prime Video snagging the distribution deal for the U.K. and Ireland, where it aired last October. This weekend, those of us in the states are finally getting to see what all the fuss has been about.

Centered on Shazad’s Nemo, a grieving widower, father and member of Indian royalty who has been forced into slave labor by the East India Company, a heartless British trade organization, the series offers a deeper dive (sorry) into the character’s backstory, which is tragically fleshed out in Verne’s 1875 follow-up, “The Mysterious Island.”

“When he wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas [in 1870], he hadn’t quite landed on who was Nemo going to be,” notes Marchand. “When he wrote the other book a few years later, he decided to make him Indian. It’s rooted in the history of the East India Company and what they did in India in the 1850s. So we took a monologue from The Mysterious Island where Nemo explained that his family was killed by the East India company.”

Using that as the character’s jumping-off point — “We’re sort of 20 years before 20,000 Leagues,” offers Marchand — Nautilus then sets out to explain how Nemo eventually wound up piloting the titular submersible made famous in literature’s earliest examples of steampunk. And like the best sea-set tales, it involves a mutiny.

“I guess the liberty we took is about the making of the Nautilus and the fact that he is forced to make it [by the Company], but then he takes it away,” he says, adding that readers shouldn’t expect to see too many other characters from the classic novel aside from Nemo.

Instead, the ship is staffed with a fleet of colorful sorts created for the show, including Thierry Fremont‘s Gustave Benoit, the architect who worked with Nemo on the ship’s design (and his much-needed voice of reason), as well as Georgia Flood‘s Humility Lucas, the feminist daughter of British privilege with a science background who winds up a hostage aboard the Nautilus along with Loti Clement (Céline Menville), the formidable guardian hired by her parents to deliver Humility to her betrothed, the snot-nosed Company shareholder, Lord Algernon Pitt (Cameron Cuffe).

Vince Valitutti / Nautilus © 2024 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

“Some of the great ideas that I didn’t have but the writers did,” Marchand admits with a laugh, “was the creation of Benoit as sort of the proxy for Verne, if you want. And then obviously, there are not many women in 20,000 League the Sea, so we created Humility, who brings that scientific elements to the story.”

Additionally, Nemo’s crew consists of a wildly disparate group of fellow slaves, which infuses the proceedings with a more expansive view of colonialism’s brutality. “It’s very rich because they’re all prisoners of the East India company. We could create this really organically diverse group of people coming from different parts of the British empire.”

And don’t worry, they don’t spend all of their time Sebastianing under the sea like Ariel. Marchand was well aware that a show set on a massive and smartly stylized submarine meant finding ways to come up for air. “We have a precinct, which is the Nautilus itself, but you don’t want to spend your life in it,” he agrees. “So you need adventures on the ship, you need adventures on the land, and obviously, you want to pay homage to the underwater world. So we had to balance all of that. … We also were keen to explore slightly different genres, if you want. So there’s obviously the kind of heist, there’s a Viking movie, there is a slightly horror-movie [episode] in Episode 5, where they’re all sort of in a coma.”

Along the way, there is a will-they-won’t-they dynamic developing between Nemo and Humility, nods to the original novel, guest appearances by Anna Torv and Richard E. Grant, and some good old-fashioned popcorn action. But will the Verne purists be finding Nemo worth the trip?

“I would ask them to forgive whatever liberties we took to that allowed us to bring, I think, a very authentic version of what Verne was trying to do, which was super entertaining action-adventure, scientific adventures, as I think he used to call them,” promises Marchand of honoring the author’s vibe. “He was obviously very interested in science. But also, if you read a lot of his books, he was interested in the world of sustainability. He was interested in the world where science was liberating in some ways, but most and foremost, he was interested in telling very entertaining stories and allowing you to have your sense of wonder. And I think the show does that, right? Episode after episode, we keep encountering crazy worlds and larger-than-life animals and situations. So I would ask them to go with the flow.”