Development In July 2016, after a series based on the
Hellfire Club, an
X-Men comic property, did not move forward at
Fox, the network made a
put pilot commitment for a different
X-Men based series. The new pilot, written by
X-Men fan
Matt Nix, was for an action-adventure series based on ordinary parents discovering their children's mutant abilities. Early versions of Nix's pilot script were received "enthusiastically" by Fox executives, and Fox chairman and CEO Gary Newman was expecting a final draft in early January 2017, with a pilot pickup within a few weeks of that. Fox officially ordered the series to pilot on January 24, and later revealed it to be titled "eXposed", and premiering in October.
Bryan Singer revealed on January 25 that he would direct the pilot, after previously directing several of the
X-Men films. He decided to do this after a change in schedule for a film he was directing. He stressed that "tonally and visually it will be very, very different" from the films, and said that "some stuff [will] go down, visually, but at its heart it's a story about a family". Singer began prepping for production on January 27. When Singer first discussed the pilot with Nix, he compared Nix's description of it to the film
Running on Empty; Nix had used that film in his original pitch for the series to executives, describing it as "
Running on Empty with mutants".
Writing Nix described the series as coming "at the world of mutants from the side"; the films and comics "have generally started with the X-Men and encountered the world outside" from their perspective, but the series looks to "take place inside the world of people who are [not] already X-Men and [do not yet] know that world." These issues reflect modern, real-world problems such as police attempting to kill mutants just because they look different, or the government only taking issue with mutants if they reveal themselves in public. Nix was influenced by the comic
District X which is "just about a district in New York. It's where the mutants are ... dealing with crime, drugs, their relationships to each other." When the Strucker children discover their abilities, Nix wanted to avoid clearly defining exactly what those abilities are immediately since "when your powers manifest, they don't come with a label. It's not like somebody pops up and says, 'Hey! You can do this!' When we think about powers on the show, what's the organic relationship between this person as a living, breathing human being, and their power? The idea is that what your power is and what you can do is influenced by who you are as a character." Nix decided to end the episode with the main characters separated, to avoid them "settling into a rut, saving a mutant every week. Separating them gives everybody a really deep emotional connection. On the mutant side, Eclipse wants Polaris back. On the Strucker side, they all want Reed, and they've gotta figure out where he is. There's a lot to do. I wanted to set up the pilot with plenty to do and a big emotional connection to what they're doing, to keep the story personal." He added, "The end of the pilot was really about getting these people together for a common problem, but they don't know each other, so what's going to happen now?"
Casting In February 2017,
Blair Redford was cast, later confirmed as
John Proudstar / Thunderbird;
Jamie Chung was cast as
Clarice Fong / Blink,
Stephen Moyer was cast as Reed Strucker; and
Sean Teale was cast as Marcos Diaz / Eclipse. The next month,
Natalie Alyn Lind joined as Lauren Strucker;
Amy Acker was cast as Caitlin Strucker;
Emma Dumont as
Lorna Dane / Polaris; Percy Hynes White as Andy Strucker; and
Coby Bell as Jace Turner. The guest cast for the episode was revealed in September 2017, including Joe Nenners as Agent Ed Weeks, Matthew Tompkins as D.A. Cal Jones,
Steffan Argus as Jack,
Dalton Gray as Jake, Pierce Foster Bailey as Trevor, Giovanni Devito as Dax,
Toks Olagundoye as Carla, and
Jeff Daniel Phillips as Bartender.
Dale Godboldo also guest stars in the episode, and
Stan Lee makes a cameo appearance. Additional appearances in the episode include Dinarte de Freitas as Pedro, Josh Henry as Ben, Jason Jamal Ligon as Side-Eye, Hayley Lovitt as
Sage, and
Jermaine Rivers as
Shatter.
Filming Filming for the pilot, under the working title
Heaven, began on March 13, 2017, in
Dallas, Texas, and was completed by April 11. During filming, Moyer, Acker, Lind, and White spent time together doing "silly family activities around town", including a trip by Lind and White to
Six Flags. For Lee's cameo, the producers learned that he was in Dallas for a comic book convention, and were told that the cameo could be filmed if it was done within a free two-hour period that Lee had before he was flying home. The scene was improvised at a bar location in 20 minutes, with actors who had not expected to be filming that day. Nix said that is "the kind of thing where I think people sometimes underestimate the degree to which we who make the show are just another group of fanboys trying to make something happen by the skin of our teeth." Some reshoots for the pilot had also been carried out by the end of April. Moyer explained that his character was originally intended to be "more obviously out for himself and slightly less interested in his kids, slightly less interested in the marriage", but in discussions between himself and Nix the pair decided to try make the character more likeable, so some of the reshoots for the episode involved this. For instance, the scene where the character learns of his children's mutant abilities was cut from the episode, and a new scene was filmed with him receiving a call from his wife about the issue while he was driving home from work. Moyer added, "We want the audience to empathize with his plight at the beginning. So we made his journey less idiomatic, less opinionated to leave it slightly more ambiguous this way." When the episode was filmed, it was set in Texas. However, production on the rest of the series was moved to
Atlanta, Georgia, after a decision on tax rebates in Texas had not been made in time for production to resume there. The episode was then altered to be set in Atlanta, retroactively, so the rest of the series could be set there as well.
Music Ahead of the episode's premiere, it was revealed that
John Ottman and
David Buckley were composing the score for the show, with only Ottman credited for the pilot. He previously scored several of the
X-Men films for Singer. As an on-set joke,
Ron Wasserman's theme from the
1990s X-Men animated series was used as a character's cell phone ring tone. It was decided that this should be kept in the final episode, though the studio thought it was too expensive. Nix said "there aren't a lot of those battles you get to win when you're making a network television show, but that one? We knew it cost more money than a regular ring tone, but it's so much fun so we're doing it." ==Release==