TV Talk: Family-friendly ‘Nautilus’ sails rough seas from Disney+ to AMC

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Like last summer’s final season of “Snowpiercer,” AMC’s two-episode debut of “Nautilus” (9-11 p.m. June 29, AMC, AMC+) represents another salvage operation.

Just as TNT declined to air the fully produced “Snowpiercer” season as a write-down that AMC later picked up, the 10-episode “Nautilus” was developed and ordered by Disney+ in 2021, only for Disney to drop the completed “Nautilus” in 2023 as part of a culling of non-Marvel/”Star Wars” IP content. AMC licensed “Nautilus” from the TV series junkyard for what’s becoming the network’s regular summer salvage slot.

“Snowpiercer” fit the AMC aesthetic — a fairly sophisticated, character-driven drama. “Nautilus” has a lighter vibe.

It’s clear what the appeal of “Nautilus” was to Disney when the company ordered it, particularly given the history of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” as a Disney theme park attraction, but “Nautilus” makes for a less natural fit on AMC, current home to the tonally darker, critically acclaimed “Dark Winds” and “Interview with the Vampire.”

Inspired by the works of Jules Verne, the 10-episode live-action “Nautilus” offers an origin story for Verne’s Captain Nemo (Shazad Latif, “Star Trek: Discovery”) from the 1870 novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” “Nautilus” cobbles together elements established in “Leagues” and its follow-up, Verne’s 1875 novel “The Mysterious Island.”

Embracing steampunk stylings, “Nautilus” is a serialized, family-friendly adventure with decent special effects that pits Nemo and his largely Indian rag-tag crew against the East India Mercantile Company’s colonizing, one-sided treaty-making patriarchy. The show is in the same league as some other Disney+ series circa 2022-23 (think: “National Treasure: Edge of History,” “American Born Chinese”), but “Nautilus” is a wholesome outsider on AMC. (By episode two, Nemo’s crew saves whales.)

As “Nautilus” begins, Nemo, an Indian prince robbed of his birthright and family, is a prisoner of the EIMC, forced into slave labor building EIMC’s submarine Nautilus, which is being constructed without the knowledge of the British government. Nemo foments a revenge scheme that sees him take control of the submersible.

Along the way, Nautilus takes on civilian passengers, including brainy scientist Humility Lucas (Georgia Flood, “Apples Never Fall”), who saves Nemo’s bacon when the experimental sub begins to sink.

Throughout its first (and surely, only) season, Nemo’s crew goes on undersea, globe-spanning adventures, all while EIMC baddies chase the Nautilus. Richard E. Grant (“Dispatches from Elsewhere”) and Anna Torv (filmed-in-Pittsburgh “Mindhunter”) guest star.

The show’s two-episode finale (9-11 p.m. Aug. 17) delivers some closure to the season-long arc while setting up plots to sail into a second season that will never come to pass.