According to New York Magazine’s Vulture, Carlton Cuse and author Rob Bell have signed a deal with ABC to co-write and co-executive produce a show called Stronger, about a musician who becomes a “benefactor and spiritual guide.”
The show will be “loosely based on Bell’s own life story as a musician who ended up founding his own church, Michigan’s Mars Hill Bible Church,” which is more Oprah than fire-and-brimstone.
“There’s also expected to be a narrative twist to the project that will make it a bit unconventional, but for now, that detail is being kept secret”
Carlton is also working on another show for ABC, Point of Honor, which has something to do with the Civil War, and is writing an African adventure movie which will star Hugh Jackman.
Damon Lindelof was the keynote speaker at the New York Television Fest on Thursday, and he had a lot of very interesting things to say about the history of LOST. An audiotape of the talk is posted at Dark UFO. These are some excerpts from a write-up at TheWrap.com:
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[After Damon met J.J. Abrams to talk about the show, he started coming up with ideas.]
“The biggest issue with a desert island show was the audience is going to get very frustrated that the characters were not getting off the island,” [Damon] said. “My solution was, hey, let’s get off the island every week. And the way we’re going to do that is we’re going to do these flashbacks.
We’ll do one character at a time and there’s gonna be like 70 characters on the show, so we’ll go really, really slow, and each one will basically say, here’s who they were before the crash and it’ll dramatize something that’s happening on the island and it will also make the show very character-centric.”
Abrams liked the idea, and also had another: “‘There should be a hatch on this island! They spend the entire season trying to get it open. And there should be these other people on the island,'” Lindelof recalled Abrams saying. “And I’m like, ”We can call them The Others.’ And he’s like, ‘They should hear this noise out there in the jungle.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s the noise?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t fucking know. They’re never gonna pick this thing up anyway.'”
Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel in "Person of Interest"
Person of Interest, starring Michael Emerson (the late, great Benjamin Linus) and produced by J.J. Abrams, starts tonight (Thursday, September 22, 2011) on CBS at 9 pm (8 central).
Update 10/24/11: If you are looking for screencaps of the LOST references in the pilot episode of Once Upon a Time, those are here: LOST shout-outs in “Once Upon a Time”
————— original August 7 post:
I had a startling moment this evening. I was sitting in front of the TV, remote in hand, flipping quickly through the channels — and all of a sudden, the word “LOST” flashed on the screen, in white letters on a black background — followed by the iconic shot of Jack’s eye, opening.
WTF? I thought.
It turned out to be the last few seconds of an ad for “Once Upon a Time.” I had flipped to the channel at the exact moment the word “LOST” appeared on the screen and hadn’t seen the part that came right before, which was “FROM THE WRITERS OF …”
The connection, which “Once Upon a Time” is milking for all it’s worth, is that LOST writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz are the producers of the new show.
I’m leery of comparisons to LOST, especially because “Once Upon a Time” seems so different — and because previous such comparisons (FlashFoward, The Event), fell flat. I’m definitely interested enough to check out “Once Upon,” though, when it starts — which is actually not for a while, considering that they are already hyping it so intensely. The pilot airs on Sunday, October 23.
I found a video showing Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse crashing the Entertainment Weekly (Jeff “Doc” Jensen and Dan Snierson) LOST panel, with Carlton wearing a Star Wars stormtrooper costume — supplied by a fan! — and Damon, a Dharma jumpsuit.
Here’s Carlton walking down the hall in his costume:
Videos via LOST in Comics, a blog written by fan artist JJ Harrison, whose poster was honored by Damon at the panel:
The LOST in Comics post has a description of the event along with pictures of Carlton putting on his stormtrooper costume backstage and then sitting, in costume, in the audience of the LOST panel, with no one around him realizing who he was.
In case you haven’t yet seen the “deleted” Season 1 finale scene Darlton showed at Comic-Con, here it is again:
At the “Fringe” panel at Comic-Con on Saturday, they played a (joke) video showing auditions for the role of Peter Bishop. Among the would-be actors in the tape are LOST alum Rebecca Mader, Damon Lindelof, Michael Emerson, and Jorge Garcia.
On Wednesday night, Comic-Con showed sneak previews of the series pilots for “Person of Interest,” starring Michael Emerson (Ben), and “Alcatraz,” starring Jorge Garcia (Hurley) — both produced by J.J. Abrams.
The blog Television Blend saw the pilots and liked both of them:
There are two things that set Person of Interest above other shows like these: Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson… Emerson’s character has some of the smarts of Ben Linus, without the creepy…. I want to see more of these two on screen, so I’ll definitely be looking out for this one …
I suspect Alcatraz is going to appeal to Fringe fans …. I’m going to be vague with the premise here because one of the biggest strengths of the pilot is the way the story’s layers are peeled back a little bit at a time as the episode moves forward….
While …. we’re meant to take [Garcia’s] character seriously, there are some mild shades of Hurley thrown in there for some light comic relief…. A lot of questions are raised in the pilot, but the introduction offers enough intriguing clues to have me wanting more.
Hollywood Report did interviews with Jorge Garcia and Elizabeth Sarnoff, who was a writer on LOST and is now the showrunner (TV industry jargon for the boss) of Alcatraz.
When asked how Alcatraz is different from LOST, Jorge replied:
I believe I’m going to be a lot less sweaty! There are no planes crashing and it’s not in the jungle! [Laughs.] I play a historian/comic book guy/Alcatraz expert. You don’t want people to hunt to try and find what the next Lost is anymore. Let Lost be Lost and now find what Alcatraz is. Don’t chase Lost; love it and put it to bed. You can bring out the DVDs whenever you want but don’t go to Alcatraz looking for Lost. There may be some elements that will remind you since it comes from the same family but it’s going to be it’s own thing.
Elizabeth Sarnoff also answered a couple of LOST-related questions:
THR: Are you prepared for the inevitable Lost questions?
Sarnoff: Absolutely. I worked on the show for a long time and there are a lot of people on our show that worked on it: Jack Bender, Jorge Garcia, J.J. Abrams. I welcome that: this is our past and this is our present.
THR: How does Alcatraz compare to Lost?
Sarnoff: I don’t think it’s like Lost because the show at heart is a procedural show. We have a story end to our show where we’re going to catch a bad guy every week as well as a really bad guy from Alcatraz, so it’s a very different show. Alcatraz is going to feel like it moves a hell of a lot faster because we have a lot of story to get through.
Here are some clips of both shows, along with reactions of fans at Comic-Con:
A few more clips from “Person of Interest” are here.
Person of Interest is supposed to start on Setember 22. Alcatraz starts sometime in early 2012 — I don’t think they announced a date yet.
