“It’s as improbable to get this on the air as it seems,” Ponies co-creator David Iserson says on the latest episode of Deadline’s Crew Call podcast about landing a series order for the 1970s, Moscow-set spy series he co-created with his longtime The Spy Who Dumped Me screenwriting collaborator Susanna Fogel.

Ponies follows two secretaries, Bea (Emilia Clarke) and Twila (Haley Lu Richardson), at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1976-1977, who after becoming widowed are turned into CIA operatives as wet behind the ears as they are. The series was a go before the strikes, and Iserson explained that the show “went through multiple regimes of multiple networks to get here.” Peacock showed the most passion, giving them a cast-contingent order.

At a time post-strikes when series are harder than ever to find a green light no matter the IP or talent attached, Iserson and Fogel explain how they threaded this needle. When it comes to the future of Ponies, the duo also tells us that they could briefly touch on 1980s Reagan-era Soviet Union, though not entirely, as they feel that domain has already been saturated in streaming and TV. The series will continue to take place in the 1970s.

“Our show isn’t about the fall of Communism, and America ‘good’ and Soviet Union ‘bad’. It’s about how both governments are pretty bad and have done unforgivable things, and how do these two women find their purpose,” Iserson adds.

What also appealed to Fogel and Iserson about the time period was that at a moment of American feminism, here are two female protags plucked out of that sphere and into a place that had not embraced that ideal. Says Iserson, “The Americans and the British had no success in Moscow running a spy (operation). And so, they were just willing to, make unlikely plans and field unlikely agents, and this idea that women wouldn’t be followed was a thing that they really noticed.”

While the two haven’t put pen to paper yet on Season 2 (Peacock hasn’t ordered it yet), they left plenty of danglers: there’s a Soviet mole in Cheryl (Vic Michaelis) in the U.S. embassy who has the ability to compromise Bea and Twila’s work. Bea’s husband is alive in a Belorussian village; she’s unaware, and we don’t know if he’s good or bad. The nefarious KGB officer Andrei (Artjom Gilz), who Bea has been seducing, has escaped with the KGB wrecking havoc on the CIA. Andrei has goods on Bea and Twila. Ditto for the duo when it comes to Andrei.

Listen to our chat with Fogel and Iserson below: