AMC’s new suspense drama “Turn” is about the close-knit band of patriotic spies dubbed the Culper Ring, who effectively changed the course of the Revolutionary War. But ideally, for these shadow figures essential to America’s founding, “Turn” — or any history of these heroes — would never exist. The group was so successfully secret that the public only learned of it in the 1930s when a trove of letters were discovered in the trunk of a ring descendant’s home.
“A lot of these guys took their secrets to the grave,” says creator/executive producer Craig Silverstein, who based “Turn” on Alexander Rose’s heavily researched book about the ring, “Washington’s Spies.” “They wrote letters back and forth to Washington personally, and they burned their letters [from him], because if they were found they’d be dead. Washington should have destroyed his, but he didn’t!”
Public recognition was never a consideration for the Culper Ring. “The problem for spies was that it wasn’t popular or honorable,” says Silverstein. “It actually helped turn the tide of the war, but there were no medals given out for spycraft, as there are now.”
What “Turn” dramatizes are the origins, inner workings, and emotional swirl around that groundbreaking espionage unit, made up of childhood friends from Setauket, Long Island: husband and farmer turned spy Abe Woodhull (Jamie Bell), whaler turned courier Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall), housewife turned signaler Anna Strong (Heather Lind), and the ring’s brainchild, army officer Benjamin Talmadge (Seth Numrich). Commencing in the fall of 1776 when a battered, stranded Washington was in desperate need of intelligence from inside British-held New York, the series initially focuses on Woodhull, a family man of Tory upbringing reluctantly drawn into lying to his neighbors to further the patriots’ cause.
“He’s swearing loyalty to the King with his fingers crossed behind him,” says Silverstein. “A spy was somebody who literally crawled on their belly to the top of a hill, spied down with their eyes, counted ships and stuff, and ran quickly back to their own side. The concept of keeping somebody behind enemy lines who kept up a lie, who lived a cover, was radical at the time.”
Viewers with only a passing knowledge of the war, says Silverstein, will quickly grasp that the conflict wasn’t as black and white as often taught in school. “It wasn’t just red versus blue. There was a lot of grey,” he says. “People like Abe didn’t know this was an actual war. They thought it would just blow over. The voice of the rebel revolutionary was a minority voice.”
For Lind, the role of Anna was a chance to portray “a feminist before there were feminists,” she says. “She’s a brave, extremely self-sufficient woman who will do almost anything to survive. She believes in the cause of the patriots. A lot of the reason Anna was so successful was men would openly talk politics around her, not expecting her to understand any of it or be interested. As a woman, she put people at ease, so she became a really useful tool to the spy ring.”
The hands-on nature of espionage’s early days, when much of the modern craft was invented, was another revelation for Lind.
“They had to get really creative how they communicated, and how to be covert about it,” she says. “You get a real feeling for how that trust developed between people. Social media have made revolutions complicated and effective in lots of ways now, but to see it before, when people were still figuring out how to tell secrets, who was on their side, you get a sense from this show about the cost of fighting for something you believe in.”
The show’s period accuracy — from language and behavior to all matters military — is being attended to by consultants, primarily “Washington’s Spies” author Rose, but also professors and experts. As for accents, no one will sound entirely “American,” because families were still perhaps only one or two generations away from their British, or possibly Irish, roots. Says Numrich, “Everyone has a slightly different sound, which is kind of a fun thing to play with. It was very intentional. There wouldn’t have yet been a uniform sound.”
The production was based in Richmond, Va., partly because of a tax credit but also due to the city’s colonial heritage — cobblestone streets, preserved buildings and interiors, history-minded locals as extras — but also the skeletons of sets from previous productions such as the HBO miniseries “John Adams.” The James River, meanwhile, was transformed into the Atlantic Ocean via computer effects that remove one of its shores and extend the water digitally, adding ships as needed. Sets on soundstages capture the rest, but for Lind, it’s the exteriors and historical sites that make “Turn” special for her.
“Everything sort of reeks of history,” says Lind. “I remember feeling how many ghosts there are around this part of the country. It’s very powerful to me.”