Let Tom Hiddleston be your guide to Pompeii's final day

That said, “A lot of what’s causing some of the strange shape of the Bay of Naples is actually related to another volcano to the northwest of Vesuvius that nobody talks about, Campi Flegrei,” said Jackson. “Nobody makes TV shows about Campi Flegrei, but that’s a supervolcano. The eruption of that in the geological past is actually what’s believed to have caused that big bite in the bay.” The team also hired high-caliber professional actors to perform the scripted scenes. “The word docudrama has a stigma to it,” said Wright. “I think National Geographic very generously is saying, ‘We’re coming up with a new form of storytelling.’ It’s always been there; we’re just trying to refresh it. A big part of that is the drama’s got to be real. The mistake a lot of those shows maybe made in the past is your experts, your historians, your presenter tells you something, and then you just see that thing exactly as you were told. What we were trying to do was bring to life these people’s emotional interiors. And to do that, you have to have great actors. “If somebody were to follow you and I around and write down everything we did today, you would have all the facts, but it would be missing your emotional context, your interior life context that you can only get through psychology, through imagination, through the cultural storytelling,” said Wright. “The history will only get you so far. The only way you can fill in those gaps is through those techniques. We can’t go, ‘Hey, that’s exactly what happened.’ But as one of our experts says, ‘That’s a story that we could believe. That is a story we know could be true.’” Pompeii: Out of Time premieres on July 21 on National Geographic, and it will be available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu the following day.