Wayward shines

Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has had a rough few years. After storming his way onto the movie scene in 1999 with the sleeper hit The Sixth Sense, each of his subsequent projects seemed to slide in quality. Even when movies like The Happening and The Last Airbender made money, they were so poorly reviewed, they damaged his artistic reputation. So much so that when Sony was marketing Shyamalan’s most recent film, the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle, After Earth, the studio avoided mentioning his role as director (something for which Shyamalan should be eternally grateful).

Yet if we go back to Shyamalan’s first few films, before he was prematurely hailed at age 29 as the next Spielberg or Hitchcock, we can see the undeniable storytelling talent there—his ability to slowly build an ominous atmosphere, his knack for hooking us with a mystery then reeling us in to unexpected, yet carefully constructed answers. These strengths, plus a few new ones, are back in force in Shyamalan’s new television series, Wayward Pines, premiering on FOX on May 14.

While searching for two missing colleagues, secret service agent Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon) gets into a car accident. He awakes in the small, picturesque town of Wayward Pines, Idaho. Something immediately feels off about the place. For one thing, everyone still uses rotary phones. For another, the ice-cream loving sheriff (a fantastic Terrence Howard) responds to Ethan’s news of discovering a dead body in an abandoned house with little more than mild curiosity. These questions, and a dozen other no less intriguing ones (Why does the town have no crickets? Why does one character think it’s 1999 while another believes it’s 2026?), build to a mind-bending revelation several episodes in.

Though Shyamalan executive-produced the show and directs the first episode, he didn’t write the scripts, which are based on the best-selling novels by Blake Crouch. This is a good thing, as, with the pressure to provide Shyamalan-style twists falling to other shoulders, he’s left free to focus on building the quirky character of the town and establishing its strange inhabitants.

As the series lead, Dillon is, as always, a little wooden. But the rest of the cast, including Carla Gugino as Burke’s ex-partner and Oscar-winner Melissa Leo as a demented nurse, are fantastic. Wayward Pines is drawing a lot of comparisons to Lost, and while it certainly shares some of that hit’s dark mood and pseudo-sci-fi conspiracies, it feels more old-fashioned—a bit like the original Twilight Zone where all the episodes crafted to share a single, interconnected storyline. You can almost hear Rod Serling narrating.

It also feels old-fashioned for what it leaves to the imagination. One of the frustrating things about our current “Golden Age of Television” is that it began with cable trying to compete with films in R-rated content and now has networks trying to compete with cable. It’s become a never-ending arms race for more and more explicit material on television. As with Shyamalan’s early films, Wayward Pines proves that it’s perfectly possible to break out of this tiresome and limiting box—to create a sense of dread without prolonged shots of gore, to establish that two characters are having an affair without an explicit sex scene.

That’s not to say that Wayward Pines isn’t creepy or that its characters aren’t sinful—it is and they are. But, for the most part, the show does only what it needs to establish these facts, then uses the rest of its time (as it should) to further develop the narrative.

Moving to the small screen has become all the rage with big name movie directors like David Fincher (Netflix’s House of Cards), Steven Spielberg (CBS’ Under the Dome, TNT’s Falling Skies), Martin Scorsese (HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), Guillermo Del Toro (FX’s The Strain), and Steven Soderbergh (Showtime’s The Knick), to name only a few. Based on the early episodes of Wayward Pines, the TV trend may once again have audiences mentioning Shyamalan’s name among that pack.