Tuesday, June 2

Exclusive: 'Aquarius' Unrated Cut to Debut on iTunes

Creator John McNamara confirmed rumors of an unrated version via Twitter Monday afternoon.

If you thought you'd seen all of "Aquarius," think again. Despite releasing the full season a day after its premiere, NBC and production companies Tomorrow Studios and King Baby have more Manson, murder and David Duchovny in store for fans. As discussed in Indiewire interviews with the cast and creator, an uncensored version of the first season will be available soon on iTunes.

Series creator John McNamara took to Twitter (for the first time) in order to break the news properly.

In an interview with McNamara published Sunday, the creator talked about how and why the series needed a second cut.

"There are two versions of every episode," McNamara said. "It started with the fact that this was developed with a cable company before NBC, and I could never shake that feeling of, 'I want to do it this way.' And Bob [Greenblatt] was great about saying, 'Do whatever you want, but you can't say 'fuck' and can't show cocks.' [...] So Jonas [Pate] called the post[-production team] and said, 'What would it cost to do two complete different versions? Shoot that, shoot this and then cut them together.' And she said, '$12,000 an episode.' And we said, 'Do it.'"

"So we ended up with two different versions of the series," McNamara continued. "There's the version you'll see on NBC and NBC.com, and then there's the version you'll see on iTunes and in Europe. And they're different. [...] Our thing was, this is not at all to be prurient. Nudity is part of the '60s and the real sexuality of the '60s. Yes, the version you'll see on NBC is sexual. The version you'll see on iTunes is NC-17." 

"There's basically a cable version and a network version," director and executive producer Jonas Pate added. "It was sort of an experiment, and I think going forward something we can experiment more with."

Series lead David Duchovny commented on the differences in creating the separate versions in an interview with Indiewire — in which he lamented the loss of "the full flower of the English language" in the NBC version. 

"There's the cut, and then there's the fucking cut," Duchovny said. "So there were some scenes [with] pivotal lines — I remember there was this scene where I was yelling at Claire Holt's character, and I say, 'It's not a fucking fairy tale.' And it was just the right line. We had to do it both ways, obviously. But it wasn't normally written out that way. The scripts were not written with that language, so there's not a lot of added language. There's some."

In late April, NBC announced the first season of its summer drama "Aquarius" would be released the day after its two-hour broadcast premiere on May 28. Fans can watch all of the first season right now at NBC.com, via Hulu and on various VOD platforms.

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