‘Why Electricity as a superpower?’ reveals author Naomi Alderman ahead of the release of her novel adaptation, Toni Collette starrer Amazon Original series The Power

A thought-provoking yet horrifying cautionary tale of repression, violence, and the exercise of power, Prime Video’s upcoming drama The Power is all set to premiere on Prime Video. Based on an award-winning science-fiction novel of the same name by British author Naomi Alderman, The Power is a story about four teenage girls who suddenly and mysteriously develop a special power that allows them to electrocute people at will. From London to Seattle, Nigeria to Eastern Europe, the ‘power’ emerges from a tingle in teenagers’ collarbones to a complete reversal of the power balance of the world. In face of these unprecedented events, political unrest and gender disparity take a never-seen-before twist. 

In The Power, it is the skein – an organ made up of a striated tissue near a woman’s collarbone which is the source of the electrostatic power released via the hands – that grounds the show in a physical reality. Author Naomi Alderman shared how she came up with the highly unique idea of electricity being the power that teenage girls acquire in this Prime Video drama, “Once I knew that I wanted to make women physically more powerful than men in the novel, I had a few different ideas of how to do it. I thought of making women bigger, with bigger muscles, but that felt too comic. I messed around with weird superpowers, something to do with pheromones.” 

Naomi further revealed that the idea of electricity emerged from electric eels and electric fish, she added, “But in the end, I settled on electricity because it’s real because it exists in electric eels and other electric fish that have evolved on the same planet as us. So, I could research it, and limit it in real ways. It could feel as organic and true as it is in the actual world. Batteries were invented by looking at the bodies of electric eels, after all.”

The series stars Toni Collette alongside John Leguizamo, Auli’i Cravalho, Toheeb Jimoh, Josh Charles, Eddie Marsan, Ria Zmitrowicz, Zrinka Cvitešić, Halle Bush, and more. The first three episodes of The Power will premiere exclusively on Prime Video on Friday, March 31, with new episodes available each Friday, leading up to the season finale on May 12.