Vampire saga set for TV
Houston author Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’ to air on Fox
“The Passage,” a TV series based on Houston author Justin Cronin’s epic vampire trilogy, is coming to Fox in January and — as is always the case with these things — will be substantially different from the books.
The first season will focus on Project Noah, the mysterious science facility where scientists are experimenting with a dangerous, unknown virus. Ultimately, the world is overrun by infected, vampirelike creatures. The show is being overseen by Liz Heldens (“Friday Night Lights”), director Ridley Scott (“The Martian”) and writer/director Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”).
“The reason the beginning of the show is different (than the book) is an effort to give everyone a credible point of view,” executive producer Heldens said at the broadcaster’s Television Critics Association panel for the show in Los Angeles, according to Variety. “That was an effort to make sure all of the characters had nuance and you could understand why everybody was doing what they were doing.”
Variety also quoted Heldens as conceding she sees three seasons: Project Noah, the Colony and then the last segment of the book. The time jumps in the book remain, but she wants to “slow down the story a little bit” so the audience understands
the “good intentions and bad decisions that lead to the end of the world.”
Cronin, who was living in Houston when he wrote the books — “The Twelve” and “City of Mirrors” are the other installments in the trilogy — is OK with the changes. After all, the books span 1,000 years of future history and he thought they were unadaptable. “My goal in writing the books was to tell it on the biggest possible canvas possible. I had 1,000 years and hundreds of characters. When I wrote the books, I knew it was impossible to adapt,” SyFyWire quoted him as saying.
Reeves originally was tasked with making “The Passage” into a movie but couldn’t figure out how to condense everything into two hours. “We kept trying to crack the script,” he said, according to SyFyWire. “We worked on it a long time, and I finally figured it out and said, ‘This is a TV show, not a film.’ The story is so massive and beautiful.”