Reasons You Should Watch Wayward Pines

This past weekend at Wizard World’s Philadelphia Comic Con, M. Night Shyamalan treated a small group to the exclusive sneak preview and chat about his new show, Wayward Pines.

Here are the reasons you should watch:

• The show is a combination of Twin Peaks, Twilight Zone and Lost, opened with an amazing first episode, directed by Shyamalan. It is also inspired by David Lynch, to which Shyamalan added “Right now on my desk literally sitting on it is a copy of Blue Velvet by Lynch, to get some osmosis or genius out of it.”

• The powerful cast includes Dillon, Terrence Howard, Carla Cugina, Juliette Lewis and Melissa Leo. “Matt was our first choice…and we sent him scripts and he was really excited to do it” Shyamalan added. After getting Dillon signed on, he decided to make it an “East Coast” kind of show and kept trying for actors with that in common.

• Wayward Pines had many twists and turns, even in the first episode, and of course ended with a shock. Every seven minutes or so, something would happen that was so surprising and interesting that the audience could not wait for the show to continue. Shyamalan also explained that there’s a significant reveal in every episode that makes it worth watching.

He also calls the show “inappropriately funny” at times. For instance, as the main character, played by Dillon, begs the sheriff (Howard) to come see the dead body he found, Howard listens while eating ice cream, and can’t stop talking about the taste of his rum raisin. Shyamalan added “Now every time we go somewhere for a press junket or something there’s always rum raisin ice cream waiting for me.”

• Inside Information. Shyamalan treated the crowd to a nice Q&A afterwards as well, where he gave some interesting tidbits about the show. “He ate like ten ice cream cones and he didn’t stop at all during the takes. I was like ‘you can just pretend’ but that’s not Terrence…and it was actually rum raisin.”

• Shyamalan also explained his move to television. “Over the last years, it [the movie business] has become much more about marketability, so the movies being made aren’t artist driven as much as they used to be and are no about marketing, which you can see with all of the pre-existing, pre-branded films. The first question they ask is about how they can market it, and the second question is about the writing…not that you can’t make original movies, there’s just a smaller window for us.”

He attributed the major changes to television to HBO. “The exact opposite is happening in television…then when HBO started, they said we’re not interested in eyeballs, we’re interested in resonance, so [with] Sopranos, they wanted people talking about Sopranos. A couple million people are watching it, but everyone’s talking about it, so they buy HBO. It’s not about eyeballs, it’s that you know it’s a quality product.” The other channels like AMC saw this and knew they wanted that resonance as well, and it spread.

Wayward Pines premieres this week, May 14th on Fox. It is also based on the books series by Blake Crouch available now on Amazon.

Trailer: