'4400' Missing People Surface on USA
(Wednesday, July 07 12:02 AM)
By Kate O'Hare
It's a Friday morning on the shores of a lake about 40 minutes outside of Vancouver, Canada. A steady rain has slowed to a sprinkle, but the air is cold, the ground is soaked, and a layer of fresh snow tops the cloud-shrouded mountains leading down to the water.
Under the "video village" tent at the lakeside location, producers Maira Suro and Scott Peters of the new USA Network limited series "The 4400," peer at oversized, flat-screen monitors showing the live feed from the high-definition cameras.
A little girl called Maia (Conchita Campbell) in a 1940s-style frock stands on the beach, a group of confused people in costumes from different eras and cultures behind her. Special-effects fog pumped across the scene curls around Maia and the others. With the white tendrils of mist, the gray-brown beach, the silvered water and the frosted peaks, the monitors present a nearly monochromatic, almost painterly image.
"These monitors make watching dailies less necessary," Suro says, "because you've seen it. Visually, it's pretty stunning."
Premiering with a two-hour episode on Sunday, July 11, and continuing for four more weeks, until Aug. 8, "The 4400" chronicles the ripple effect of the sudden return of 4,400 people who mysteriously vanished at various points over the last century. For the "returnees," no time has elapsed since they vanished, and they have no memory of where they've been.
But clearly something has happened to these people, because many return with superhuman abilities, including great strength, precognition and a healing touch.
According to Suro ("Platinum") and Peters ("The Outer Limits"), the idea -- originally pitched to FOX, but ultimately rejected -- is to track the sociological, scientific and human consequences of the attempts by these displaced souls to reintegrate themselves into their families and society.
Along with writer-executive producer Peters and executive producer Suro, executive producer Rene Echevarria ("Dark Angel") contributed to the development of the pilot, and Ira Steven Behr ("Star Trek: Deep Space Nine") has joined the team as an executive producer and the principal show-runner. "The 4400" is a Viacom Production in association with Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope and Renegade 83.
The large cast includes Peter Coyote ("E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial") as Dennis Ryland, supervisor of the federal agency created to investigate and oversee the 4,400; Joel Gretsch ("Taken") as Tom Baldwin, Ryland's subordinate, whose nephew, Shawn (Patrick Flueger), is a returnee; Jacqueline McKenzie as Diana Skouris, a federal agent with a medical background, who is partnered with Tom; Mahershalalhashbaz Ali as Richard Tyler, a black Air Force pilot who vanished in 1951; Laura Allen as Lily Moore, who vanished in 1993 and is the granddaughter of Tyler's lover; and Michael Moriarty as Orson Bailey, a man who vanished in 1979 and who returns with terrifying and deadly abilities.
"USA has been so supportive of the human drama that the show brings," Suro says, "so we've continued to play to that. Sixty percent of the show is about those human moments."
"If you have cardboard cutouts for characters and lots of special effects, who cares?" Peters says.
USA originally ordered the two-hour pilot produced, then ordered four more scripts, so the producers designed the story to accommodate the six-hour format, while still keeping doors open for the future.
"Before we even began this process," Peters says, "we knew where it was going to end, in terms of the arc. It wasn't just throwing weirdness out for weirdness' sake, not knowing how we're going to solve this at the end. This is so much fun, doing a serialization and seeing the characters develop from beginning to end, rather than just wrapping it up at the end of 60 minutes and going, 'Well, that's all done.'
"If we go beyond this, we have plans to take left turns with the characters, put them through even bigger paces."
"And yet," Suro adds, "it's not that you can't jump in at Episode 5 and get where it's going. There is an element to each episode that deals with a new story."
After playing the nefarious and ambitious Owen Crawford in Sci-Fi Channel's Emmy-winning alien-abduction miniseries "Taken," Joel Gretsch had some initial concerns about wading into those waters again in "The 4400," even though he's not actually playing one of the returnees. But Tom's connection to the incident goes beyond his nephew -- Tom's son, Kyle (Chad Faust), was with Shawn when he disappeared in 2001, and has been comatose ever since.
"Tom is very meat-and-potatoes," Gretsch says. "He shows up, does his work, has a lot of integrity, goes home and is a good father and family man. But the doctors can't tell him what's wrong with his son. Tom is very practical, and he so badly wants to understand what's happening, and no one will give him any answers. So what that does to a character like Tom is unravel him to the core.
"Right at the beginning, when I first read the pilot, the whole sci-fi aspect of it was secondary. What is it like for someone to have that happen and go through that? How much pain would that be?
"I don't want to give too much of the plot away -- but things do happen."
Peters and Suro are circumspect about giving too many answers about just where their returnees have been and what happened to them, but Peters does say, "They definitely went somewhere. It wasn't a natural phenomenon."
Here's the link,
tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274|89050|1|,00.html