Blake Crouch (Pines Wayward), author and creator of Apple TV+ series Dark Matter, discussed the adaptation of his own novel for television. Crouch has had his Wayward Pines Trilogy and his novel Good Behavior both adapted for television.
He had intended to be just a writer for the show, but he eventually realized that he was the only person he could trust to spearhead it. “I had this epiphany that Dark Matter is my child — and why would I let someone else raise my child?” He said.
Crouch told Variety that Dark Matter was intended to be a move at first. “I wrote a script, a couple other screenwriters came in and did passes and revisions, and we only really got that script to, like, a solid B,” he said. “You’re supposed to kill your darlings in the adaptation process, but we were killing all of our emotional and character darlings just to fit it into 110 pages. Jason was abducted on, like, page 10. It just started to feel like a slick, soulless, sci-fi movie. So, I thought the project was dead.”
Then, according to Variety, Crouch heard that Sony Television was interested in turning it into a television show. “Then one day my producer Matt Tolmach told me Sony Features was allowing Sony Television to take it as a TV show,” he said. “And I immediately knew what the show was. I knew where every episode break was, and had this flash of how to do it. And from then on, it’s felt like a charmed experience.”
As Variety writes, Crouch was concerned that a scene where Dark Matter’s lead character Jason Prime visits a universe that was decimated by a pandemic wouldn’t be well received because it was too soon after the COVID pandemic, “That’s exactly why I left it out when I was first writing the scripts,” he said. “It was during COVID, and I thought, ‘Nobody wants to watch anything about a pandemic.’ So I left it out. It was actually Jennifer [Connelly] (Labyrinth, Top Gun: Maverick) who came to me and said, ‘I miss that scene, it’s really powerful.’ And we thought about it, and figured, let’s give it a shot. There’s a million ways this could go wrong but if we can nail it, it’ll be really powerful. And it’s one of my favorite scenes of the series. And it exists because of her.”
The full interview can be read from Variety here.