Crash course
Wrecked embraces anarchy, idiocy and the cannibalism of life without Wi-Fi.
Wrecked Season 1 Fridays (from 17 March) M-Net Edge (*102) 18:50
Each episode summary for Wrecked (2016- current) includes the phrase “the island makes a discovery that could change everything” – a wicked little throwback to one of Wrecked’s major influences, the audience-baiting sci-fi drama Lost (2004-2010). Wrecked is like a dark comedy version of Lost but with the characters from The Office (2005-2015). It’s about a team of opinionated idiots making terrible decisions and getting stuck with consequences that don’t go away – much like the corpses of passengers who didn’t survive the plane crash that strands everyone on the island at the start of the show.
THIS GANG OF IDIOTS
The series’ creators, brothers Justin and Jordan Shipley, couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the group of people who were forced to survive together was made up of just
the regular sort of people who annoy us in supermarket queues. “Lost was about 40 people on an island, but we only saw about 12 people each week,” explains Justin. “And those 12 were the most handsome and the most capable. But we always wondered about the 30 people in the back, the ones who would say, ‘What’s happening up there? We can’t hear you’.” Jordan adds that “we know that if we’d been in that situation, we would have been the first to die. Instead of dealing with the most capable, we wanted to take a plane full of lovable idiots and see how they would deal on an island”.
ISLAND LIFE
Like Lost, Wrecked was shot on a real tropical island in Puerto Rico. And as absurd as the show is, the creators went all out to “mine the comedy in what would be the actual disappointments” of being survivors of a crash in a tropical paradise – like not having internet access, getting to the stage where only the gross chip flavours are left and, above all, having to decide everything by committee vote. It’s no surprise that it soon breaks down into revenge, power grabs, politics – and, yes, cannibalism.