Z: The Beginning of Everything

“Not to alarm you, but the writers from Z are in the room,” the conference cochair Melissa Barker murmured as I hastily grabbed my badge, bag, and program en route to deliver a rather academic critique of the new Amazon series, Z: The Beginning of Everything, to what I presumed would be an audience of sleepy-eyed literary profs and brighter-eyed graduate students. Nine o'clock on a Monday morning in a basement classroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, is not exactly where one expects to meet a Hollywood showrunner. The one great break in an aspiring screenwriter's career is to get two minutes “in the room”—or at least in an elevator—with such folks. Yet in an ironic twist akin to a Garrison Keillor radio tale, Hollywood had come to beautiful downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. The Mountain to Mohammed. The pitch room, to moi. And instead of a rushed two-minute spiel,...