Parallel lives in Awake
- 09 September 2011
- John Howell
How does this sound as a TV show premise? Police detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) regains consciousness following a car accident involving his wife Hannah (Laura Allen) and his son Rex (Dylan Minnette). After the accident, Michael keeps shifting between two alternative realities, one reality where his son is dead and his wife has survived, the other reality where his wife is dead and his son has survived. After a time he starts noticing strange links between the two realities. He wears a different colored rubber band to determine the reality he is in as he tries to work out how to keep both his son and wife alive.
This is the premise of a new NBC TV show called Awake. You may remember Jason Isaacs from the underrated science fiction thriller Cypher, and numerous feature film supporting roles, including the Harry Potter series, Dragon Heart, Event Horizon and Black Hawk Down.
“In some ways it’s as finite an idea as any romantic comedy such as Moonlighting or Bones,” Executive producer Howard Gordon told SFX magazine. “Those shows allow tension to exist between men and women for seasons until they get together. In this show, Britten is having a relationship with himself.
“If this were a movie it would really be by definition about Britten trying to resolve which is real and which isn’t,” he said. “I think what Kyle masterfully did in the pilot is have a guy who is adamant about not uncorking these divergent realties. As a result, we really get to have a guy who is insistent, like the little Dutch boy with his fingers in the dam, but he definitely pays a price for it. Yet it is also a tremendous gift, and this duality gives him a very, very unique edge in solving crimes – of course, one of which is not real. Nevertheless, we’re invested in both and we’re interested in how those cases cross over into one another.”
The idea sounds like a winner. Awake will be out January 2012 on NBC in the US. You can watch two clips from Awake on YouTube below.
The fourth instalment in the über-stylish Underworld series,...
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