Oscar-winner Melissa Leo has signed onto M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming TV series Wayward Pines. The event series received the greenlight from Fox earlier this month, with an autumn 2014 debut scheduled.
Based on the novel Pines by Blake Crouch, the pilot has been adapted by The Playboy Club‘s Chad Hodge. Dillon stars as Secret Service agent Ethan Burke. When he arrives in the small Idaho town, he is tasked with finding out what happened to two missing federal agents. As expected, all is not as it seems as he winds up with a fistful of questions and no answers in sight.
Leo will play Pam, an “intense, unpredictable” nurse who tends to Burke after he ends up in Wayward Pines hospital. Starting off their relationship nice as (cherry) pie, Pam soon reveals her true colours and the two become enemies.
The show’s creators have acknowledged that Pines owes…well, its central premise to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal cult classic, Twin Peaks. That show focused on Kyle McLachlan’s Agent Cooper. Sent to the small Washington town of Twin Peaks to solve the murder of Laura Palmer he too finds himself grappling with more questions than answers. Twisting, turning and offering up the finest slab of Lynchian you’re gonna get, the show captivated audiences in the 1990s.
Following on from Fox’s previous success with limited event series (a fixed number of episodes for a story arc) The Following, they’ve also added the 24: Live Another Day reboot to their TV slate. You’ve got to wonder why Shyamalan was approached for such a project. The director once synonymous with boundary bustin’ inventive thrillers has lost his clout in recent years. The Last Airbender suffered huge financial losses along with a severe critical beating. His latest feature, After Earth arrives soon in cinemas so we’ll see if he’s sharpened up.
Wayward Pines will premiere on Fox in 2014.
