Wayward Pines
Wayward Pines is the new television drama premiering May 14 on FOX from Chad Hodge and the fallen star that is M. Night Shyamalan. From the trailer, it seems to concern a federal agent investigating a sleepy Midwestern town with a dark secret. Bursting with originality, I know. Shyamalan’s career has pretty much been a straight line down from his acclaimed breakthrough Sixth Sense to the critical disaster that was After Earth. Each film just a little worse than the last, Shyamalan has lost more and more respect with every unexpected twist and vivid use of the color red.
Shyamalan loves the unexpected. TV, for example, was an unexpected direction for him to go in, which is good. Adapting someone else’s work (in this case, a novel by Blake Crouch) is also unexpected given his, ahem, dubious history of adaptations in the past. But as someone who secretly holds faith that he still has it in him to tell good stories, I’m a little apprehensive that Shyamalan went with the extremely expected small-town-with-dark-secret trope. It’s Twin Peaks, Gravity Falls, The Stepford Wives, Blue Velvet. Hell, it goes all the way back to Young Goodman Brown. It’s a an old trope, yes, but hopefully one that still has potential to surprise and fascinate us. If there’s one thing Shyamalan likes doing, it’s surprising.
There seems to be something viscerally satisfying about dark secrets behind idyllic towns. We live such frustrating lives, full of disappointment and confusion and malice. When we see something perfect on our screens, it rings false to us. There’s no way anything can be this good when our own lives are so hard. We want it to be exposed as dirty and corrupt. Things that are too good to be true are disturbing — think about how creepy any saccharine children’s show can be — and so we yearn to learn the truth.
At this point, Shyamalan doesn’t even care enough to pretend the town of Wayward Pines isn’t hiding something dark and terrible — the trailer makes it abundantly clear — but that’s OK. A twist is the last thing we want Shyamalan to rely on, at this point. Our only hope is that over the course of the series, he can focus less on an unexpected surprise and get back to some of the stylistic and storytelling choices that earned him his acclaim in the first place.
