Keep your eyes peeled and don't doze off. It's got an all-star cast, a big-name director and it's a mess. A very interesting mess, mind you. You need patience, a sense of humour and a keen eye for the ridiculous.
Wayward Pines (Fox, CITY-TV, 9 p.m.) is it. It's been very heavily promoted in recent weeks. The star is Matt Dillon and you will also find Terrence Howard, Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo and Carla Gugino in it. The director is M. Night Shyamalan, an alleged master of surprise-twists ever since his movie The Sixth Sense had a head-slapper of a shocking twist at the end.
It's a 10-episode "event series" from Fox, one of those now-common attempts by a network to mimic the dramatic torque of cable series. It's not going to be a season-long, 22-episode drama that might falter. It's going to stay tightly-focused and grip you. Or so the theory goes.
Wayward Pines will grip you if your taste runs to pop-complexity and absurdity. It is neither entirely serious nor is it outright funny. Also, it shifts course after four episodes – some promos give that away, which seems bizarre – and becomes something distinct from the first four episodes. Are you ready for this? Probably not, because while there's a lot of fun to be had in the early going, it's a monstrously frustrating excursion into attempted top-flight TV drama.
Dillon plays Ethan Burke, a Secret Service agent who, with his partner, is on a mission to find two missing fellow agents. There's a car crash. Burke wakes up, staggering through a small town in Idaho called Wayward Pines. A kindly bartender lady gives him a meal and then passes a mysterious note to him. He collapses and wakes up in the local hospital, where a menacing nurse (Leo) takes care of him.
It soon becomes clear that there's no other patient in the hospital and when Burke returns to the bar, the existence of the bartender lady is denied. He goes to the cops and the sheriff (Howard) engages him in a chat about the pleasures of certain flavours of ice cream before denying that there's anything odd about Wayward Pines.
What the heck is going on? Well, Burke could be hallucinating everything. Or Wayward Pines could be in some other dimension, one constructed to store Secret Service agents who know too much. As if. Or it could be real, an experiment in social-monitoring and manipulation. Yeah, right.
It will immediately remind you of Twin Peaks. If you are familiar with the original Twin Peaks, that is. In fact, midway into episode one, it looks like an homage to Twin Peaks is in full flight. But then it isn't. Shifts in tone are jarring and perhaps you're meant to have your mind boggled, but the real result might be you, like me, wondering, "Does Melissa Leo know she's in the same production as the other actors? Did she not get the memo?"
There are so many major flaws in Wayward Pines. Last but not least, Dillon doesn't have a knack for TV. Acting for television in this kind of production requires an intimacy with the camera that is out of his reach.
At the same time, there is an audience for this hooey. Some viewers, sci-fi and fantasy fans in particular, will savour the complex web of clues and the jumble of themes. And good luck to them with that. Others will find Wayward Pines isn't worth the effort, decline to keep their eyes peeled and duly doze off.
Also airing Wednesday
Its season finale time for The Blacklist (NBC, Global, 9 p.m.), a great show that's gone awry this season. A streamlining of plot is necessary for next season. American Crime (ABC, CTV, 10 p.m.), an "event series" series that has been outstanding, ends, too. It has been everything in terms of cable-quality sophistication that Wayward Pines is not. The textured probing of toxic issues in contemporary American social culture has been, at times, sublime.
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