Christopher Fowler on What Makes Wayward Pines Work

[froodle]

Not having a regular living-room TV for the next six months, I started catching up on box sets by streaming them on my phone. This caused a judder of horror among friends, but download time and pixel density is great, and if you wear headphones the viewing experience is much enhanced.

I’d avoided BSBing* until ‘Breaking Bad’ ate part of my life. And yet…even that groundbreaking show trod water in places, with whole episodes failing to move the story on. Then ‘Game of Thrones’ pulled the same trick. I hated the sexplanation** sequences and really don’t like sword ‘n’ sorcery stuff, and of course it’s like a soapier, shagfestier cycle of sub-Shakespearean history plays, but there were enough jaw droppers (the Red Wedding, Hold the Door etc) to keep me hooked.

I then started creeping into the less heralded areas of the New Golden Age of Television, and discovered ‘Wayward Pines’ (actually the ‘hottest show in America’ according to its over-emphatic Amazon book blurb) although it had passed me by, as a great many things do. This had the benefit of being based on a shorter book cycle, so the ten 42-minute episodes played at far greater speed, with all fat trimmed off. I’m a sucker for stories set in isolated towns where there’s something a bit off (cf ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Eerie, Indiana’, ‘The Prisoner’, ‘Banshee’ etc) and ‘Wayward Pines’ knows I am, deliberately playing on those tropes. But it ventures to go where few US series have been before – and to do so on the ad-driven no-sex-or-swearing Fox network seems little short of miraculous. Because what we have here is Subversion 101.