By now you’ve probably seen the teaser commercials for Revolution, the new show by JJ Abrams that’s slated to debut on September 17.
The premise? The world loses all its power, and humanity is forced to try and get along somehow without electricity, cars, computers and phones. Well, you get the idea.
It sounds like what everyone feared with Y2K, which thankfully never happened, and this could be a show that will makes audiences sit back and think to themselves, “I can’t wait to see how they get out of this one.”
Although the show is going to be a JJ Abrams extravaganza, the debut episode will be directed by Jon Favreau, who as we reported on TG is also working on his next film, Magic Kingdom, which will be a fantasy of Disneyland coming to life and will hopefully be a return to his earlier directing efforts Elf and Zathura. Now to help quench everyone’s appetite about the show, including mine, Collider just talked to Favreau about the show and his plans for the debut.
First Fareau addressed working on regular TV instead of cable, where there’s much less restrictions, and he said, “What started off as a trend with cable television has spread out and now is hitting network. The audience has a tremendous capacity for sophisticated storylines. As the movie industry becomes more and more restrictive, you’re seeing this opening up on the TV front. There’s always going to be dumb stuff out there, but there is room for really smart storylines.”
And indeed, as one screenwriter told me some time back, there used to be a big separation between writing for movies and writing for TV, but now it’s reversed where some of the best writing is on TV, and some of the worst writing’s in the movies. With Revolution, there’s also the hope you can tune in at any time and dig it, and with any show you may need time to grow and develop an audience.
So yeah, there’s a huge disaster, but as creative types often like to say, it’s about the people and the emotions, and indeed it will be interesting to see how a handful of people will react to something like this.
Favreau also mentioned that Logan’s Run was an influence, especially when Michael York and Jenny Agutter got outside of Sanctuary and were out of the technological world of the future.
“The place that everybody was so scared of [outside] turned out to be a bit of a paradise.”
Of course we won’t know for a while whether it will be paradise or paradise lost for Revolution in the ratings, but it sounds like everyone’s moving in the right direction so far.
