Survival stories of ordinary folks yanked from the routine of their daily lives remain wildly popular on our screens. Characters are tested and forced to survive in isolation in a hostile environment, unsure if they’re ever going to be rescued. Keep Breathing, helmed by Martin Gero (Blindspot, The L.A. Complex) and Brendan Gall (The Lovebirds, The Go-Getters), tells the story of Liv (Melissa Berrera) who battles the elements in the Canadian wilderness as well as her own demons. Gero and Gall discussed bringing their time-discontinuous, slow-burning, thriller to the screen.

“We had just finished working on Blindspot, one of the loudest shows on broadcast television,” exclaimed Gero. Keep Breathing was the respite from it. “As Brendon and I walked around the Warner Bros. lot, we brainstormed ideas for the quietest show we could do next.”

Martin Gero

Both Gero and Gall are Canadian and often escape to the wilderness to unwind. “There’s a lot going on in the world and it felt very stressful to be alive. We wanted to take the audience into the wilderness where it could be thrilling, but also serene, contemplative, and hopefully restorative,” Gero pondered.

Gero continued that the general linearity in telling survival stories needed to be disrupted with non-linear sequences. “You have to find food, water, fire, shelter, and a way home.”

The idea for Keep Breathing began with the setting and the high survival stakes and it went from there. At one point, Gero and Gall considered the show having no dialogue following the plane crash. As the idea flourished into a TV series, they built out Liv’s backstories – one showing her relationship with her family, and the other showing her high-powered legal career. “The backstories provided us with a mystery and something more to discover about Liv that wasn’t so linear.”

For Brendan Gall, their spin on the survival story was the quietness. “Silence was one of our influences. We were feeling chaotic in our lives and chaotic in the kinds of stories we were telling. We were stressed and isolated during the pandemic and we were craving peace and a time to sit with ourselves against our will.” Liv was certainly forced to sit with herself and reflect on her life in the absence of the career smokescreen she created for herself.

Liv is incredibly strong in most ways, but has never dealt with her demons – Brendan Gall

Keep Breathing was more than ‘not-Blindspotting.‘ Gero and Gall looked to All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford for creative inspiration “because it’s so emotional and captivating with almost no dialogue,” mused Gero. Keep Breathing was initially written very novelistically in a similar style. Although Liv emotes many of her inner thoughts, there were times when she had to verbalize them through dialogue to ensure the audience fully understood her story.

“Many scenes in All Is Lost are mainly procedural with steps to survival,” added Gall. “Having no dialogue, made it difficult for the cast to follow where they are in the story. It’s a lot to hold inside an actor’s head when you don’t have cue lines. During the filming of All Is Lost, someone would read the scenes to Robert Redford to keep him on track.”

Gall and Gero took this approach, especially for the more complicated scenes depicting Liv’s inner life and psychology.

Brendan Gall

To Flashback Or Not To Flashback

Flashbacks are often frowned upon as often-misused literary devices. However, they can be effective when used correctly to bring the audience into past and relive it in real time. “We used them to get a deeper understanding of how Liv came to be in the present moment and what brought her here,” said Gall. “Liv’s hyper-intelligent, hyper-driven, yet incredibly armored up as a defence mechanism.” Once she’s completed the survival tasks for the day, she must reckon with her family demons. “She spends so much time thinking and not talking, it makes sense that we’d also be privy to these thoughts as they arrived,” he continued.

“It’s all about story shape too. Early on, the flashbacks are extremely impressionistic – a single image or a barrage of images of her mother or something,” added Gero. “As Liv’s life gets stiller, the bigger thoughts are able to enter,” Martin continued. “Terence Malick was an influence behind such image pops in the thick of horrible situations,” continued Brendan. “Inwards is the place we go to for escape and solace.”

Martin Gero joked that the extended scenes with minimal or no dialogue was an antidote to their verbose writing style. Keep Breathing is a show that demands to be watched more than heard. “It earns its visual tension through this.”

Some cutaways of Liv’s journey are illustrated by premonitions of her imagined alternative or future life rather than flashbacks. “Liv’s tether on reality has weakened as she became more desperate, caused the past, further, and present to blur together,” said Gero. “She’s also imagining the conversations she could or should have had. The imagined conversations are sometimes as profound as the real ones, especially with people that we have lost. We gain context and wisdom as we get older.” Liv isn’t necessarily losing her mind, but these scenarios are cathartic to her character and facilitate her healing. These literary techniques are in service to maintaining the high stakes in Keep Breathing.

Three Stories

Keep Breathing braids three aspects of Liv’s life into one series. “The present story of survival lead the series,” asserted Brendan. “We found the other two backstories through what was happening in the present. We either provided relief or reinforce her feelings about what was happening.” After Martin Gero and Brendan Gall wrote the first drafts of all six episodes, they went back to retell each story strand in a more linear and coherent fashion.

The silence and stillness of Keep Breathing relies on a carefully-modulated rhythmic pulse to play as a fragmented stream of consciousness. “It’s purposefully slower than the pace of regular television. It’s more steady,” said Gero. “We wanted to experiment with our impulses.”

“It was also an exercise in discomfort sitting with a pace we weren’t accustomed to. It’s neither ours nor Liv’s natural metabolism,” added Gall.

Danny (Jeff Wilbusch) & Liv (Melissa Barrera). Photo by Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix

A key moment in Liv’s journey is the realization that nobody is coming to rescue her. She’s completely on her own. There is no log of the flight, its passengers, or its illicit cargo. “It grows into an existential dread,” said Martin. “This is both the greatest punishment or reward you can give someone who’s never made time for their thoughts.”

There is also a deeper theme at play in the show. “Liv’s looking for answers outside of herself… answers she feels she doesn’t have,” opined Gall. “She’s a lawyer by trade. She sees things in black and white, right or wrong. She’s not used to looking inwards.” Sometimes, not every question has an answer. “Her reluctant inward journey also forces her to take external action like lighting a fire.”

Liv isn’t entirely comfortable with relationships. This is evident with her hot and cold attitude to boyfriend Danny (Jeff Wilbusch). “She doesn’t trust the good things in her life. Even when things are going well with Danny, she feels the bottom is about to fall out of their relationship,” said Gero. “In some respects, she’s afraid to be alive and happy.”

During early development, the writers’ room was just Gall and Gero tossing around ideas. “We wrote six outlines (one per episode) and shifted them back and forth. It allowed for more trial and error although we kind of knew where we were going,” said Gall. “It allowed a vulnerability to the process.” Many of Liv’s key realizations were discovered during this time. For example, “Liv realizes that her mother leaving wasn’t the problem. It was her inability to recover from it that was the problem.” This healing created the space to imagine a happy life with Danny.

With regard to his writing,Brendan Gall noticed his interest in circles from his playrighting days. “The cycles people fall into and repeat.” Martin Gero felt that his writing is characterized by “people who are trapped and trying to escape. There is also an optimism and humor in my work.“