Tim Kring Talks ‘Dig’ Challenges and What the Series’ Future Could Look Like

USA Network’s newest series, Dig, premieres tonight, and we cannot wait for you guys to check it out! All week, I’ve been sharing highlights from my interviews with the cast when I visited the set in Albuquerque last December. The first night we arrived, we were able to attend a cocktail party with series co-creator and executive producer, Tim Kring. We had a rather informal conversation with Kring about what the series would bring to the table for fans, and he shared photos from filming with us on his phone.

The following day, we were able to sit down with him for an interview, and one of the first questions I asked him was about the challenges that he faced in bringing this story to life.

“Well there’s 1,000 challenges a day, but it’s an odd one because usually … This show has had some logistic issues obviously. None of us are going to try and pretend that they didn’t. How often do you have a war that breaks out in the middle of your shoot. It just doesn’t … So because of that we were then forced to make some big moves and to re-conceive things in ways and all of that. It’s interesting, the usual things that go wrong on a show just never went wrong on this. Nothing. In terms of like the story’s worked, the actors were great, the actors weren’t Prima Donnas, you didn’t get characters together that didn’t have any chemistry.” Kring answered. “Usually that happens and the audience never knows but you cast with an eye towards something that’s going to be a big thing and you get on the set and you say, “Oh my god this is never going to work. These two people are terrible together,” or, “We’ve miscast this,” or … you know what I mean? So you try to work it and sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. That’s why a lot of shows don’t work out is because of that.”

Dig never had any of those problems according to Kring. The problems that they did face were much more unique and quite frankly terrifying.

“The problems we have are things like, “Oh there’s missiles flying outside.” Just it’s been really interesting how none of the usual stuff, the stranger things. Then just the having to build, having to … When we were in Israel we had this story-line that takes place in the Southwest and trying to find the American Southwest in Israel was nearly impossible. It was taking up endless amounts of time driving all over the country looking for ways to find some building and convert it to a motel, a classic southwestern motel, or a diner, an American-style diner. We spent thousands of hours searching, looking. Then you come here. We’re sort of forced to come to actual American Southwest to shoot that story and you literally could not swing a dead cat without finding any one of those locations. It became so easy to do that story here and then so difficult to do the stuff that was Israel here.” Kring explained. “So wherever we went we had … so that was the challenge. The challenges have been finding a realistic version of these different places.

Being that there was so much violence in the area while they were shooting the pilot, I asked Kring who made the final call on getting out of the Holy Land.

“We had wrapped the pilot and we were in prep on the next two episodes. Location scouting, casting, all the things. We were in the middle of that. It was literally the day that we were going to shoot all the inserts for the pilot that … It was clear things had already started to happen. There were some missiles fired over Tel Aviv and a couple of days of this. All of the locals were saying, “You know this happens and it’ll be really quickly. It’ll go away quickly. It’ll go away quickly.”, and sure enough it … One day we all just kind of felt like, “Hmm.”. I think it was not the show.” Kring answered. “I think the show would have tried to figure it out … but obviously we have employers who don’t want to put their people into any kind of jeopardy. So it was really made on that decision.”

Kring also mentioned that they had planned to shoot the rest of the series there had things been safe enough for the cast and crew.

“As you may have known from before we had Keshet the Israeli network, the biggest network, was partners in it and it was going to be a real joint production between the two. So it was a huge disappointment for all of us who had been there and scouted and made friends with people and all the commitment that was put into it by all the Israelis that worked on it.” Kring explained.

Fans can expect Dig to deliver the answers that they seek as the episodes unfold. However, since the story will be, for the most part to my understanding, contained in this 10 episode “event series,” I couldn’t help but wonder what the future of the show would look like if it is successful. What would season 2 or season 3 be? Would there be a new cast? Brand new stories?

“There are certain cast members that would stay. We’d like to have them. But the truth is it really is a story about a legal attache and in a legal attache, if you don’t know, is always an FBI agent stationed in foreign countries in the consulate who investigates crimes against and by American citizens on foreign soil. So it opens up the world to anything. He happens to be stationed in Jerusalem and he happened to be buddied up with an Israeli cop but he could also happen to be stationed in some other exciting part of the world and be buddied up with somebody else. So it leaves the world really kind of wide open.” Kring explained.

Will you be watching the premiere of Dig tonight? Let us know your thoughts about the new series in our comment section below!

Dig Sneak Peek

Photo Credit: USA

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