Daybreak Finds Hope In The End Of The World

"Surviving high school is like surviving the apocalypse," Aron Eli Coleite, the co-creator and executive producer of Daybreak, says over the phone from his Los Angeles house. Some days high school does feel like the end of the world. It's essentially the elevator pitch for the new Netflix series, which follows an audience of teens in a post-apocalyptic Glendale, California. Right after a nuclear holocaust wipes out mostly each person over the age of 18 — and the adults who survived are turned into bumbling zombies — it's up to a crowd of high school students to carry on civilization. Obviously, this is all just one intricate, blood-soaked metaphor for a harsh truth: Adults have damaged society, and right now it's up to the young people to repair it.


And sort in attempt to do that, they have to work with each other. Yet that's a whole lot easier mentioned than done, especially once you're on the run from the juiced-up jocks who have seen Mad Max one also several times. (Because even right following the end of the world, lunch room politics still apply.)


At the center of Daybreak are three teens who find one another at the correct time: Josh, your relatively average, somewhat charming white man on a quest to find his missing girlfriend; Angelica, the smart-mouthed young girl who also happens to be a certifiable genius; and Wesley, a reformed bully who abandons the jocks to be a pacifist samurai. While Daybreak generally seems to be Josh's story at the starting, it actually smartly subverts the Chosen One trope for something much deeper and more compelling.


MTV News chatted with Coleite about the narrative twists of the show, why teens are going to save us all, and that incredible Japanese cover of a Backstreet Men classic.


MTV News: You begin with Josh's POV, although because the season progresses we get indoors within the heads of a lot of different characters. Who is the hero of this story? 


Aron Eli Coleite: I really believe we're all of the hero of our own story. And thus from everybody's different point view, they're all of the hero of this show. They're all central to it, they're all of the hero. We began with Josh partially because that's how the book begins. The book is really from this regular white guy narrator perspective, and we embrace that. We were like, "Let's use that and then let's begin to flip it on its head." As the other characters are just as interesting if not more interesting to me then Josh is, and Josh is this Trojan horse for us. He's this usual, white, young kid pining for the girl, and yes it was a way of routinely averting expectations.


MTV News: Any time while he cuts off his own finger... That's how I knew he wasn't the hero of this story. 


Coleite: It's not that I like punishing Josh, however he has so much to learn. He thinks he is the hero of his own movie, nevertheless he stabs his sword through that Ghoulie and lets it run away with his sword. In his mind, he's this swash-buckling, astonishing warrior. Although in reality, not so much. He's in the method of learning and he has so much to go through.


MTV News: Is there a character that you identify with the most, or do you know they're all sort of injected with a segment of you?


Coleite: They're all injected with a piece of me. Nevertheless I think I gravitate a little more to Wesley than anybody else. There's just a nerdy, kung fu samurai LA film nerd in Wesley. That was just a possibility for me to talk about Ninja III: The Domination. And he gets to be everything that Josh isn't, yet he's also just on a very, very interesting journey. Nevertheless there really are parts of Turbo that are me, there's parts of Angelica that are me. We also have an incredibly diverse and astonishing writing employees. And we wrote things all with each other. I give them full credit for really embracing the story.


MTV News: So it was a really collaborative writers' room? 


Coleite: We write things all with each other. It's a really big, collaborative community and our employees has an incredibly diverse and very strong POV. I know what my limits are as a showrunner. I'm very good at writing the "cis white male from Encino," Jewish point of view. I'm pretty good at that. However telling a young females coming-of-age story, telling Wesley's coming-of-age story as a young Black gay man. I rely on stories all of the writers to give this true authenticity.


MTV News: I really loved Wesley's episode. Episode 5. That Backstreet Men cover at the end was perfect. 


Coleite: We made it for the show. The fight [sequence] wasn't coming with each other along with we had hoped. And I was like, "OK. I know what we're going to do. We're going to black and white, and we're going to do an awesome Japanese cover." We looked through a bunch of songs and any time we landed the Backstreet men song ["I Want It That Way"], I knew it was going to be astonishing. So we had it specially recorded because it was just so brilliant for that moment between Turbo and Wesley. It brings a deep joy that we were actually able to pull it off.


MTV News: What was it about Brian Ralph's Daybreak graphic novel that pulled you in?


Aron Coleite: Brad [Peyton, co-creator] had initially written a feature version of Brian's graphic novel, which was my first introduction to Brad. I just read the script. Right now, I'm a fan of zombie horror. And zombie comedy and horror comedy. However what I saw in it was, here's a kid who looked at the end of world because the ideal thing that ever happened to him. And that was the key to creating the series. Because that's how I felt in high school, and I feel like a lot of people feel like that in high school. Man, if the world ended, it could be fantastic. I don't have to go to high school anymore, and I have a possibility to reinvent myself and be anyone I'd like to be.


There was a movie that I watched a lot in the '80s called Night of the Comet, which was a funky horror film and lot of wish fulfillment. Halley's comet basically passes over and wipes out all of the adults, and the kids have a blast because they can have any vehicle they want, they can dress how they want, there's no rules. I remember loving that movie. This felt like a possibility to combine this coming-of-age story with a post-apocalyptic landscape. It had more in typical with Mad Max than it did with Walking Dead in terms of creating tribes and who you fit in with and where do you belong and why do you fight for survival.


Surviving high school is like surviving the apocalypse. It is the ideal time of your life and it's the worst time of your life all combined with each other. And why we survive the apocalypse is the same way that we survive high school, which is with our sort of companions. I have teenage ladies, and I delude myself into believing I'm one of the most crucial things in their life. And that is utterly not true. I know it's not true because I remember being in high school and feeling like my parents are idiots and it's my companions who are the most crucial people in my life. They're the people who really help you day-to-day get by means of the struggles of growing up.


MTV News: At the end of Angelica's episode there's this really fantastic scene where The Witch essentially tells her to "be the monster." Embrace the things that make you different. All of those characters are outsiders in that way, and so they all feel different.


Coleite: I feel like even people who we perceive to be on the indoor also feel like they are on the outdoors. I know I was an outsider. This show is a lot of me and the full writing employees and even everybody in production sort of dealing with our high school trauma. We all feel like outsiders. And high school continues for us even as we grow into adults. We never really get over the fact of, man, it'd be cool to be on the inside. We just aspire to be cool, and we all feel like we are outsiders and still no one is aware us and we're looking for our communities. However one of the big things about now is it's so okay to be an outsider because you could find your communities in so several different places. There's so several different good niche communities of people where you could really find where you belong. As crazy as everything getting, there really is a level of empowerment that I haven't seen in a long time.


MTV News: That goes back to every character feeling like the hero of this story. The teens are the heroes; the adults are the monsters. 


Coleite: It's not an accident that the adults are Ghoulies and that the adults mention the last foolish thing on their mind. Because I think that's what adults do. That's why we ruined everything. I think that there really are some very good adults, however I feel like overall we think the stupidest thoughts. And not to be overly optimistic about it, although it's on this generation to repair it. And I think they can. It's hopefully [this show] sends a positive message that this categorize of kids can do it better than we did it.


MTV News: As someone who grew up watching a lot of film and television, it must've been quite a dream come true to have Matthew Broderick cast because the principal of this high school. 


Coleite: It was unthinkable. I mean we wrote it for him, and I have been doing this long enough to know you'll do not get your first choice. It doesn't happen. And we were told he doesn't do television, that it was also referential to Ferris Bueller, which isn't necessarily his preference thing. Nevertheless as the role was so different is why he engaged with it. I think he really enjoyed the idea of getting to play against type and being able to play the bad guy. And he really responded to being able to really do something that would speak to a different generation. He was game for anything. He was a little bit concerned with the language [laughs]. One sticking point he had was, "You talk about female anatomy really disgustingly in the show." And, I was like, "If we talk about male anatomy identically as disgustingly, would that be OK with you?" And he's like, "Yeah, that's fine, as long as there's equal representation." And that's what we did.