Little Schmidt Productions
Colony
Television Series · 2016–2018 · 3 Seasons · 36 Episodes
Behind the wall, survival has a price.
The Production
Overview
The Story
Colony begins after an event known as the Arrival has transformed Los Angeles. Enormous walls divide the city into controlled blocs. Alien occupiers known as the Hosts remain largely unseen while a human-led Transitional Authority governs everyday life through surveillance, military force, checkpoints and collaborators.
At the centre is the Bowman family. Former FBI agent Will Bowman and his wife Katie are trying to protect their children in a city where ordinary family decisions have become political acts. Their son Charlie was separated from them during the Arrival and remains trapped outside their Los Angeles bloc, giving Will an immediate reason to challenge the boundaries of the occupation.
Will's attempt to cross into another bloc exposes his former law-enforcement background and brings him to Proxy Governor Alan Snyder. Instead of imprisonment, Will is recruited to help the Occupation locate members of the Resistance. The arrangement offers him resources that might help recover Charlie, but it also places him inside the machinery controlling the city.
Will does not initially know that Katie has already become involved with the Resistance. Working with Broussard and an underground cell, she passes information obtained through her husband's new position. The marriage therefore becomes a miniature version of the occupied city: two people trying to preserve the same family while making radically different choices about collaboration and resistance.
The series deliberately keeps the alien Hosts at a distance during much of its early storytelling. Their power is visible through the wall, drones, advanced technology and the human institutions acting in their name. That makes occupation feel bureaucratic as well as extraterrestrial. Food, work, movement, education and personal relationships are all shaped by rules enforced largely by other humans.
Across the second season, the world beyond the Los Angeles bloc becomes increasingly important. The Bowmans' efforts to reunite and survive expose more of the occupation's structure, the Resistance becomes less morally simple, and the mysterious alien technology known as the gauntlet becomes central to a much larger conflict.
Season three expands the geography again. The family moves beyond the familiar Los Angeles bloc environment into forests, camps and eventually Seattle. The story reveals that the Hosts themselves are part of a wider war, changing the question from whether humanity can overthrow an occupation to whether humans can survive between competing extraterrestrial powers.
Across 36 episodes, Colony uses science fiction to examine choices made under occupation: resistance, collaboration, compromise, loyalty and survival. Its largest visual ideas — walls, drones and alien technology — matter because they reshape the smallest unit in the story: a family trying to remain together.
The Production Challenge
How do you occupy Los Angeles without destroying it?
The visual premise depends on contradiction. Colony needs Los Angeles to remain recognisable while showing that normal civic life has been fundamentally reorganised. Instead of presenting a conventional ruined city, the production layers checkpoints, Authority graphics, surveillance, drones and impossible walls onto familiar streets and neighbourhoods.
Recognisable City
Homes, streets and public buildings preserve everyday Los Angeles, making the Occupation feel imposed on a world that existed before it.
Invisible Power
The Hosts are often absent physically, so architecture, drones, human collaborators and alien technology must communicate their control.
Expanding World
Later seasons move beyond the original bloc, requiring the production language to survive across wilderness, camps and a different city.
Family · Authority · Resistance
Main Cast
The ensemble is organised around competing loyalties. Characters can work for the Occupation, oppose it, cooperate with it temporarily or move between those positions as circumstances change.
Josh Holloway
Will BowmanA former FBI agent and Army Ranger recruited by the Occupation to hunt Resistance members. Will's overriding priority is his family, forcing him to navigate collaboration, investigation and rebellion without ever becoming completely comfortable in any camp. Holloway's move from Lost into Colony marked an important stage in his television career, explored further in After Lost: What Really Happened to Josh Holloway?
Sarah Wayne Callies
Katie BowmanWill's wife and a secret Resistance operative. Katie's decision to fight the Occupation places her inside a clandestine network while her husband's work gives her access to information the Resistance desperately wants.
Peter Jacobson
Alan SnyderThe Proxy Governor of the Los Angeles bloc, a skilled political survivor whose relationship with the Bowmans repeatedly changes. Snyder embodies the complicated space between collaborator, administrator, opportunist and reluctant ally.
Tory Kittles
Eric BroussardA former military operator and major Resistance figure. Broussard is disciplined, experienced and increasingly important to the Bowmans as the struggle grows beyond the politics of a single Los Angeles cell.
Alex Neustaedter
Bram BowmanWill and Katie's eldest son. Bram's experiences with the occupation pull him toward resistance and force him to form political judgments independently of his parents.
Isabella Crovetti
Gracie BowmanThe Bowmans' daughter, whose childhood is shaped by an education system and social order designed under the Occupation. Her storyline shows how control reaches beyond soldiers and checkpoints into belief and identity.
Behind the Production
Two production regions.
One occupied world.
The first two seasons were produced in Los Angeles, allowing the series to place its fictional occupation directly over Southern California. For Season 3, production moved to Vancouver, British Columbia — a relocation discussed by the cast during The A.V. Club's Vancouver set visit. Rather than hiding every consequence of that change, the story itself expanded beyond the Los Angeles bloc into forests, camps and Seattle.
Familiar geography makes the occupation more disturbing.
Using Los Angeles gives the early series a recognisable civic world. Streets, residential neighbourhoods, institutional buildings and infrastructure can remain largely contemporary while occupation signage, checkpoints and digital extensions alter their political meaning.
The effect is important to the premise: this is not a distant alien planet. It is an existing American city operating under a new authority.
A production move becomes an opportunity to widen the story.
Season 3 shifted production to Vancouver, British Columbia. Co-creator Ryan Condal later explained in a season-three interview that the move changed both the economics and the visual character of the series, with Vancouver's light, weather and Pacific Northwest landscapes giving the final season a colder, broader atmosphere.
The greener environment correspondingly changes the series as the Bowmans leave the familiar Los Angeles bloc behind and encounter forests, Resistance territory and Seattle, while recurring Authority design, drones and alien technology preserve continuity with the world established earlier.
The wall disappears from view, but the world still has to feel like Colony.
Moving production regions could easily make a series feel visually unrelated to itself. Recurring costumes, Authority design, drones, alien technology and returning characters help preserve continuity even as geography expands.
The shift also mirrors the narrative: the Bowmans are no longer protected or confined by the boundaries that defined their earlier lives.
Little Schmidt Productions
Production
Contribution.
Colony evolves from a recognisable occupied Los Angeles into a broader landscape of forests, camps and Seattle across three seasons. Within the wider production process, Little Schmidt Productions contributed location and production support focused on the practical requirements of changing environments, regional movement and maintaining a coherent screen world across that expanding geography.
Ordinary environments have to carry extraordinary political meaning.
A residential street can represent life under surveillance; an institutional building can become part of the Authority; a forest can signal escape from the bloc. Location choices support both what a place is and what the story needs it to mean.
Occupation storytelling moves between intimate and large-scale environments.
Family interiors, checkpoints, public spaces, Resistance bases and exterior action sequences place very different demands on access, crew movement, vehicles and technical departments.
A changing production base should expand the world rather than fracture it.
When the story moves into new landscapes, production support helps identify environments that feel genuinely different while preserving the established visual logic of the series.
The final location is sometimes larger than the photographed one.
Walls, drones and alien infrastructure may be completed digitally, so practical environments need useful sightlines, scale, access and clean areas that allow visual-effects departments to extend the world convincingly.
Inside the Production
Making occupation visible
without showing the occupiers.
One of Colony's strongest production ideas is restraint. The alien Hosts do not need to stand on every street corner. Their power is communicated through human behaviour, impossible infrastructure and technology that can appear at any moment.
The Hosts control the city most effectively when the audience can feel their presence even when no alien is visible.
An impossible structure reorganises familiar geography.
The enormous walls dividing Los Angeles into blocs are among the series' defining images. They provide immediate scale for the Occupation while also functioning as a narrative device: families can be separated by a boundary that is physically impossible to cross through ordinary means.
Because the wall is integrated into recognisable city environments, visual effects must preserve perspective, atmosphere and scale so that an impossible object feels permanently embedded in the skyline.
Small machines communicate overwhelming surveillance.
Alien drones give the Occupation a mobile visual presence. Their speed and destructive capability allow a relatively small object to imply that resistance can be detected and punished almost anywhere.
For production, the actors and camera must respond convincingly to an object frequently completed in post-production, making eyelines, timing, environmental interaction and sound essential to the finished effect.
Human uniforms make alien occupation politically recognisable.
The Transitional Authority gives the series a human face for extraterrestrial control. Uniforms, insignia, checkpoints, propaganda and institutional interiors establish a repeatable design language that can appear across locations without requiring a large science-fiction build in every scene.
This also reinforces the central theme: much of the occupation is administered by humans making choices about power and survival.
A small object opens the story to a much larger war.
The alien gauntlet becomes increasingly important as the series reveals that the Hosts are not the only extraterrestrial force involved. Its physical presence allows characters to handle and transport something whose significance extends far beyond its size.
That contrast is useful production storytelling: the series can imply interstellar stakes through an object that remains dramatically usable in human-scale scenes.
Science fiction continues inside kitchens, bedrooms and bars.
The Bowman home and other everyday environments prevent the series from becoming visually dependent on effects spectacle. Food shortages, surveillance, school systems and political pressure enter ordinary spaces, showing how occupation changes routine rather than merely producing action sequences.
The grounded environments also give the larger effects more impact when the story returns to walls, drones or alien machinery.
Removing the familiar city changes the scale of survival.
Forests and open landscapes replace much of the dense occupied-city imagery in the final season. Without the wall constantly dominating the skyline, danger becomes less architecturally obvious but no less present.
The visual change supports the larger revelation that Los Angeles was only one piece of a global and eventually extraterrestrial conflict.
Three Seasons
From one family
to a much larger war.
The complete series steadily widens its field of view. Season 1 concentrates on survival inside the Los Angeles bloc; Season 2 exposes more of the system surrounding it; Season 3 moves beyond the wall and reveals that the Occupation is itself connected to a conflict larger than humanity initially understands.
Colony begins with a family divided by a wall and ends with humanity confronting a war whose boundaries extend far beyond Los Angeles.
Life inside the bloc.
The first season establishes the Bowmans, Snyder's Authority and Broussard's Resistance. Will and Katie occupy opposite sides of a secret conflict while both believe they are acting to protect their family.
The world behind the system.
The story expands beyond the immediate occupation bureaucracy, develops the importance of alien technology and forces the Bowmans toward choices that make their old life in the Los Angeles bloc increasingly impossible.
Beyond Los Angeles.
The final season relocates the family into a wider landscape, introduces new Resistance structures and develops Seattle as a different model of occupied society before the alien conflict moves toward open war.