{"id":10607,"date":"2019-01-15T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/tvdrama\/"},"modified":"2019-01-16T13:17:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T18:17:17","slug":"the-passage-from-book-to-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"The Passage: From Book to TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

Justin Cronin\u2019s best-selling <\/em>The Passage has taken a long and winding road to the small screen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Before the book had even hit shelves in 2010, Ridley Scott\u2019s Scott Free and 20th Century Fox had already scooped up the film rights. The project remained in development as Cronin released parts two and three in the trilogy, and eventually Scott and the team at Fox determined that the story was better suited to television. The first pilot produced was reshot and recast, and in May 2018 the show finally landed a series order on FOX. Penned by Friday Night Lights<\/em> alum Liz Heldens, The Passage<\/em> premiered on FOX in the U.S. last night with a cast that includes Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Brianne Howey and Vincent Piazza. Scott is an executive producer alongside writer\/director Matt Reeves, Heldens, David W. Zucker, Adam Kassan and Jason Ensler.<\/p>\n

Jumping back and forth between present day and a post-apocalyptic future, Cronin\u2019s trilogy tells the story of vampire-like creatures called virals, and a young girl who holds the key to finally destroying them. For the TV series, Heldens homed in on present day, focusing on a secret medical facility, Project NOAH, that is experimenting with a virus that could cure all disease. The experiments end up creating a breed of new beings that feed on humans.<\/p>\n

“I came at this as such a fan of these books,” Heldens said at a press junket at New York Comic-Con. “In 2011 or \u201912, I was doing a deep dive into the apocalypse\u2014I think about the end of the world all the time!\u2014and then I read Justin’s books and they really stood out as being different. They were so character-oriented and so human that you kind of forgot that it was a show about virals and just started hooking into the characters. I looked into it a little bit right after I read it and it was being made into a movie. In 2017 I found out that 20th Century Fox wanted to do a series and I jumped all over it.”<\/p>\n

On the challenges of adapting Cronin\u2019s tomes, Heldens noted, \u201cthey\u2019re ginormous. I said I want it, I\u2019m doing it, and then I got it and I was like, \u2018Shit, how am I going to do this?\u2019 It took a little bit of thinking about it and a couple tries, but we settled on breaking it up into pieces and having the first season be all the stuff that takes place at Project NOAH. We\u2019re talking about the first season as being the bad decisions and good intentions that lead to the end of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe trilogy is a million words, almost,\u201d Cronin added. \u201cIn different books and at different moments, I tap into different anxieties,\u201d the author said about the messages behind the story. \u201cWhen you get to the third novel and these events are being viewed from a distant future, the metaphor is environmental. Mankind creates an \u00fcber-predator that eats the North American continent. It\u2019s a metaphor for environmental destruction, for over-reach of science. This was vampire genre, end-of-the-world genre, and then in a lot of other ways it was a domestic novel that passes as a Western. The television show doesn’t have all the same material since there’s less space to operate in. It’s a much slower build.”<\/p>\n

After having spent years on the trilogy, Cronin told TV Drama<\/em> that the experience of watching the long-in-development screen adaptation was “totally strange\u2014in a great way! It was fascinating. It was a version of the story, just like every reader creates a version of the story in their head. I’m very calm about that. The question I get asked a lot is, How do you feel about people changing your book? The answer is, the book is exactly the same as it always was! Nothing has changed! That\u2019s the smart-ass answer. [The series is] a version of it that isn\u2019t created by me. No version of the story has ever been created by me. Every time somebody reads the book, they\u2019re doing half of the creating work in their head. I watched the pilot and I was looking at Liz\u2019s dream, I was peering into Liz\u2019s head and seeing what she saw.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gosselaar stars as federal agent Brad Wolgast, who is tasked with bringing a young girl, Amy (Saniyya Sidney), to the Project NOAH facility after she is selected as a test subject. Gosselaar discussed the challenges of being a part of an adaptation, particularly given how well loved the original source material is. \u201cThere are pros and cons to having a built-in fan base, especially when it comes to books and how fanatical\u201d people are about them, Gosselaar said. \u201cI\u2019m a huge fan of the books. And I\u2019m a purist and I want to stay true to the books because why change a thing, it\u2019s perfect. It took me a while to appreciate what we\u2019re doing and also appreciate the books and not try to feel like we have to mirror exactly what Justin did. He said that what we\u2019re doing is not the television version of his books, it\u2019s a whole other being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heldens described the relationship between Brad and Amy as the \u201cbeating heart\u201d of the series. \u201cAs the series unfolds, we\u2019re trying to make the viewer hook into the other characters in the same way. We\u2019re using a flashback structure to tell the backstories of some of the virals. We\u2019re trying to make sure that by the time we get to the end of this chapter, you\u2019re invested in all of these characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those include Chriqui as Brad\u2019s ex-wife Dr. Lila Kyle; Piazza as Clark Richards, one of Project NOAH\u2019s lead scientists; and Howey as death-row inmate Shauna Babcock, one of the test subjects being confined at the facility.<\/p>\n

Howey, who was previously on The Exorcist<\/em>, said she “loves the female characters” at FOX. “They are so imperfect, they’re really human, and I love how it’s this outlandish plot but grounded in reality.”<\/p>\n

On preparing for the role\u2014a character that was male in Cronin\u2019s trilogy\u2014Howey told TV Drama<\/em>, “This is our round two. Shauna was a bit different [in the first pilot]. She was a little crazier, a little wilier. They’ve tapered here down to be [someone] who maybe had a shot at a normal life if these circumstances didn’t happen to her. Which is a lot less on the nose and more interesting. And it makes it scarier because this could happen to anybody. With the vampire stuff, the prosthetics really help! It’s hard not to feel in character. I’ve got fangs, these crazy eyes, the veins, I feel intimidating. [The virals have] these super immune systems, so everything is heightened, and that’s fun to play with. It’s kind of animal-like.”<\/p>\n

Shauna\u2019s relationship with Clark \u201cchallenges his morality,\u201d said Piazza on his character\u2019s development. \u201cDuring a time like this, where we\u2019ve changed so much in the last 20 years and now technology has created a societal shift, these programs come up,\u201d Piazza stated about the raft of apocalyptic series popping up across the globe. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of genre shows and films and they seem [to take place] in another world. This one is still in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Passage<\/em> began rolling out on FOX in Asia and Europe today (January 15). FOX Latin America will begin airing the series in April. Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution is the international distributor of the show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Executive producer Liz Heldens, author Justin Cronin and stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Emmanuelle Chriqui talk about the new series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":10608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,70],"tags":[2876,2875],"class_list":["post-10607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-profiles","category-top-stories","tag-liz-heldens","tag-the-passage","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Passage: From Book to TV - TVDRAMA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Passage: From Book to TV - TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Executive producer Liz Heldens, author Justin Cronin and stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Emmanuelle Chriqui talk about the new series.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVDRAMA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-01-15T14:00:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-01-16T18:17:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2017\/07\/ThePassage-ComicCon-119.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"319\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mansha Daswani\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/\",\"name\":\"The Passage: From Book to TV - TVDRAMA\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2019-01-15T14:00:12+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-01-16T18:17:17+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/the-passage-from-book-to-tv\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Passage: From Book to TV\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/\",\"name\":\"TVDRAMA\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvdrama\/#\/schema\/person\/83da304c8bad8bfdb3edd7eb47cfe5ad\",\"name\":\"Mansha Daswani\",\"description\":\"Mansha Daswani is the editor-in-chief and associate publisher of World Screen. 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