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

There’s probably been no series to live a more tortured, pushed-and-pulled existence than “Snowpiercer,” which returns for its final, fourth 10-episode season at 9 p.m. July 21 on AMC and AMC+ (seasons one through three are streaming on AMC+).

The much-delayed return — the season three finale debuted more than two years ago — and move from TNT to AMC marks the show’s final resting place after a twisty and complicated existence.

Based on the 2013 Bong Joon Ho-directed film, which was taken from 1982 French graphic novels, TNT ordered the “Snowpiercer” TV series in early 2018. Turner then bumped the series to TBS in an ill-fated move to add dramas to a comedy-focused network before rethinking that decision and premiering the show on TNT in May 2020 to healthy ratings (3.3 million viewers across a simulcast on TNT and TBS).

Seasons two and three aired on TNT, and the network ordered a fourth and final season only to shelve it (after it was complete) as a financial write-down. Production company Tomorrow Studios shopped season four (and proposed spin-offs that now seem unlikely) for almost two years before AMC picked up the show in that fire sale.

Set seven years after Earth became a frozen wasteland, the post-apocalyptic series is set on a constantly moving train that circles the uninhabitable globe. In season three, the train splits in two with Melanie Cavil (Jennifer Connelly) leading passengers on Snowpiercer while Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) took other passengers on a train led by the engine Big Alice as they settled at a thawing part of the planet dubbed New Eden.

Season four catches viewers up with the folks who’ve found New Eden in episode one and then the passengers with Melanie on Snowpiercer in episode two.

In addition to the show’s network move drama, “Snowpiercer” also ran through multiple showrunners. Paul Zbyszewski (“Lost,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) settled in to helm this final season.

Zbyszewski said he was grateful to the show’s previous showrunners, Graeme Manson and Aubrey Nelson, for talking with him about the series.

“They lent me their ears and their time and their wisdom in the process as season three was still going,” Zbyszewski said. “I got to pick their brains. They were totally open and honest and insightful. I threw a couple of ‘What ifs?’ at them and they were like, ‘That sounds really cool,’ and I was just grateful they were open to the conversation.”

Zbyszewski said at the start of season four’s writers’ room, they had an inkling season four might be the final season, but they did not yet have confirmation of that. But as a collective, the writers and production company ultimately decided to write toward a satisfying series finale.

It helped, Zbyszewski said, that several writers from the third season of “Snowpiercer” stuck around for season four, particularly given all the intricacies involved in telling a story set partially aboard a train.

“There was a large amount of fictional train logistics we had to constantly keep track of: What’s the order of the cars? Where was the border car? When they split, which train got a market car? Was that in third class? What cars don’t have a sub-train? Are the utility cars the only ones with hatches to the sub-train?” Zbyszewski said. “The learning curve was tricky for the new folks, including myself, coming aboard. But as much as we had to keep track of what came before, we also felt the need to bring something different and original to the show, otherwise we’d find ourselves treading water and repeating the same character conflicts over and over again.”

Zbyszewski said themes explored in season four include leadership, power, decisions and consequences and what motivated those decisions.

“There’s a little bit of ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ ” he said. “And while the series was born from the French graphic novels that have this air of cynicism to them — the world is dark and it sucks — at the end it always allows for a little sliver of hope. You can’t land on the negative; there has to be something redeemable about all the trials and tribulations these people have gone through. I hope there is that hope and that’s what people take away from the show in the end.”

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