The series was created by Eric Kripke and produced by J. J. Abrams' Bad Robot for NBC, with Abrams praising Kripke's original pitch as an undeniably good premise for a series.

Season 1 was filmed in and around Wilmington, North Carolina, with many scenes shot in the historic downtown area and on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

For season 2, production moved to Texas, filming around Bartlett and Granger as well as in Austin.

A portion of episode 4 of season 1 was filmed at Freestyle Music Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The role of Rachel Matheson was originally played by Andrea Roth before she was replaced by Elizabeth Mitchell.

Jon Favreau directed the pilot episode before NBC picked up the series for a full season.

For a September 2012 advance screening in New York City, 80 of the 1,000 guests were seated on stationary bicycles to generate electricity for the event's lighting, tying into the show's power-outage premise.

Creator Eric Kripke revealed that a planned but never-produced third season would have shifted away from war storylines to a 'treasure hunt' plot centered on a mythic stockpile of supplies fought over by heroes and villains alike.

The unproduced third season's story was instead concluded through a four-part DC Comics digital series released in 2015, illustrated by Angel Hernandez, which wrapped up the show's remaining plot threads.

Reflecting after cancellation, Eric Kripke compared Revolution to The Last of Us, joking that a shorter, more serialized version of his show with a bigger budget 'would have been called The Last of Us' and would have been good.