'Aquarius' is Duchovny's trip to Manson era

The late '60s offered polarizing extremes: the Summer of Love and Charles Manson-inspired murder.

Aquarius, a new NBC drama due Thursday (9 p.m. ET/PT), looks at that rapidly changing world through the eyes of World War II vet and Los Angeles homicide detective Sam Hodiak (David Duchovny), whose police work will lead to a confrontation with Manson, an ex-con and wannabe rock star now cultivating followers who eventually will kill for him.

The era intrigues Duchovny. "It's an age we keep coming back to, and not just because of the bell bottoms," he says. "It was a turning point in American history. We could have gone way left. We had the hippie movement, feminism, the Black Power movement and civil rights. And Manson, in many ways because he was built up by the media, became the symbol of the dark side of the '60s. After him, America veered to the right in reaction to what (people) saw as the anarchy of the hippie movement, free love, free drugs, free sex or whatever you want to call it."

Hodiak is a cultural outsider in 1967, a man shaped by World War II and earlier events, Duchovny says. His stand-up buzzcut "just seemed right."

The fictional character seems bemused by society's rapid changes, some of it represented by his long-haired, undercover colleague Brian Shafe (Grey Damon).

The worlds of cop and killer begin to overlap in the premiere, when Emma Karn (Emma Dumont), the 16-year-old daughter of one of Hodiak's old girlfriends, goes missing and starts to fall under the sway of Manson (Gethin Anthony).

Hodiak "fought to save this country, to save the world. And this is what he saved it for? These hippies?" says Duchovny, who acknowledges his "wry, condescending" take on the changing culture. "That's his point of view. Then he meets Manson."

Anthony's challenge was to take what many see as a mythic figure and portray him as a real person.

"He's so notorious and infamous. The image of him in my mind, certainly before I dug into some research, was almost a mythological monster," Anthony says of Manson, who's now 80 and serving a life sentence in a California prison. "It was a challenge to dig behind what I already knew and (find out) who this person was and see where it took me."

Executive producer John McNamara believes Manson is feared more than other murderers because he persuaded members of his so-called Manson Family to commit the actual slayings, including the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969. (The final episode of Mad Men, a period drama that ends in 1970, has a line that says the Manson murders are the reason California drivers won't pick up hitchhikers.)

"He never was convicted of killing anyone" with his own hands, McNamara says. "What makes Manson terrifying, in a way that will last for generations, is that he convinced otherwise seemingly normal people, particularly the women, to murder for him on a whim. It was utter madness."

Anthony explores the character's persuasive power. "That psychology behind how you get other people to do your bidding is fascinating to dig into — and challenging" for an actor.

Music is integral to the series, McNamara says, as the era's sounds, which range from rock bands to Sinatra, can connect viewers to that earlier era. At the same time, McNamara sees parallels, some discomforting, to today's society.

"We were shooting our first Black Panther episode when the Ferguson shooting happened," he says, and the series arrives a month after a Time cover featured 1968 crossed out and replaced by 2015. "Things have not really advanced in the last 45 years in the way I think we expected them to."