The Whispers - Premiere Episode

The Whispers - ABC's new SF drama series based on Ray Bradbury's "Zero Hour" - premiered on Monday. According to Variety, it got reasonable ratings, so I assume its future on primetime US television is assured for the time being.

The opening episode had some strong behind-the-scenes talent attached. Writer-producer Soo Hugh has been associated with Under the Dome. Not the greatest series of all time, but one which at least is sometimes able to sustain some mystery and suspense. Co-director Mark Romanek made the admirable Robin Williams film One Hour Photo, although his career since has never quite matched up to that early work.

Because of the Under the Dome connection, I half-expected The Whispers to be full of artificial suspense, shocks and surprises. Instead, it had multiple plot threads which started out independently but turned out to be connected. Nothing earth-shattering, but not bad TV plotting, especially in setting up what I assume might be a five-year series if those ratings hold up.

Not surprisingly, the show very quickly diverges from Bradbury's original story. However, what Bradbury-derived material there was seemed quite fine to me. There were the kids taking instruction from Drill, the parents talking on the phone and not quite paying enough attention to the kids - this taken directly from "Zero Hour". The mother at the beginning of the episode who died falling through the treehouse reminded me of another Bradbury story, "The Small Assassin", where a baby causes a mother to fall downstairs and die. Then there was the beardy guy in the hospital, who was covered with tattoos. Ah, Soo Hugh read "Zero Hour" in The Illustrated Man, I thought to myself. There's even one sequence which has visual echoes of "The Screaming Woman" from Ray Bradbury Theatre.

 

Of course, for every Bradbury element, this Amblin Entertainment production also had a Spielberg element: the kids, of course, plus the toys that take on a life of their own, and the mystery-object-found-in-the-desert (how could it possibly have got here?) - this could have been Close Encounters, or ET, or Poltergeist.

Overall, though, it was far better than I feared, and good enough to make me want to see more. I didn't care for the deaf kid (unconvincingly written and performed), and the mystery-object-found-in-the-desert (how could it possibly have got here?) was visually underwhelming. But otherwise, good stuff. I doubt there will be any Bradbury after this first episode, though.

One thing struck me as odd. There wasn't any credit to Bradbury on-screen anywhere that I could see. I imagine this is a contractual matter between ABC and the Bradbury estate, and it's none of my business. But if I were Don Congdon Associates, I would have insisted on a "based on a story by Ray Bradbury" credit at the head of each episode.

 

Over on io9, a reviewer suggests that The Whispers misses the point of Bradbury's story. It's a good review, which gave me a few chuckles. But it seems to me that you can't expect an open-ended TV series to have the same point as a short story that runs to just a few pages. I would hope that The Whispers is designed to reach a conclusion at some point, but it's not being advertised as a closed serial of defined length. Rather, it is typical network TV fare, working on the principle of "let's keep it going as long as we can, and possibly consider concluding it at some unspecified point in the future - if we don't get cancelled at short notice". The best we can expect, I think, is that "Zero Hour" be treated honorably as the jumping-off point for the series, after which it becomes its own thing.

The Whispers = "Zero Hour"

On Monday 1st June, ABC airs the first episode of The Whispers, a science-fiction TV series based on Ray Bradbury's short story "Zero Hour". The series was announced a long time ago, and has been delayed several times. Let's hope the wait has been worth it.

"Zero Hour" was first published in 1947, in the pulp magazine Planet Stories, a regular home for Bradbury stories in the 1940s. Today you can find it in several Bradbury books: it's in the 1951 collection The Illustrated Man, the 1960s compilation S is for Space, and the 2003 retrospective collection Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales.

Planet Stories, fall 1947 issue.  Click to embiggen.

Bradbury's story is about an alien invasion with a difference. The alien - Drill - finds a way of communicating with Earth children.The children incorporate Drill's ideas into their play, and eventually enable Drill to take over the Earth. Like John Wyndham in The Midwich Cuckoos, Bradbury manages to tap into something inherently frightening about children. Perhaps they are too innocent, so that they just have to be up to something.

But what Bradbury's story is really about is... bad parenting. As with another of his classic short stories, "The Veldt", the parents just don't pay enough attention to the kids. They've got enough adult things to pre-occupy them, and would rather just send the kids off to play, or to sit in front of the TV. Their lack of interest in what their kids are up to, and specifically their lack of interest in the children's play, becomes the parents' downfall.

Bradbury often said that he didn't predict the future, but instead tried to prevent it. "Zero Hour" is a classic Bradburyan warning: pay more attention to your kids, or else...

"Zero Hour" has remarkable staying power. Although the story is dated in places, and clearly reads like something from the 1950s (although it was written in the 1940s), it is sufficiently non-specific about future technologies that it can stand up well today. It has long been popular in other media, too. It was all over American radio in the 1950s: it was adapted for Dimension X in 1950; Lights Out in 1951; Escape in 1953; Suspense three times (1955,1958 and 1960); X Minus One in 1955. And it has been made into a short film, and adapted by Bradbury himself for TV's  Ray Bradbury Theater - see the Youtube video below.

Although Bradbury's short story is still in copyright, somewhere along the line Anthony Ellis' 1950s radio script for "Zero Hour" slipped into the public domain, and has become a popular source for re-enactors of old-time radio. You can find the script here.

At the time of writing, I haven't seen The Whispers. Given that there have been some dreadful adaptations of Bradbury over the years, I am not expecting much from the series. But I have my fingers crossed that Bradbury's concept is strong enough to shine through whatever ABC can do to it!

Start Date for THE WHISPERS, based on Bradbury short story

After much unexplained delay, ABC has finally announced an air date for the new series The Whispers, which is based on the classic Ray Bradbury short story "Zero Hour".

TVLine.com broke the news, and published the first preview of the official poster.

Spielberg's The Whispers = Ray Bradbury's Zero Hour

Somehow this one just snuck up on me: a new TV series from Spielberg's people, inspired by Bradbury's classic short story "Zero Hour". The premise of the story is that an alien invasion takes place through children's play, and the story has been adapted for radio and TV countless times.

The trailer for the TV series clearly presents this premise - although it looks as if it rapidly moves to Close Encounters territory - with perhaps a hint of Bradbury's "The Small Assassin" thrown in for good measure.

I don't see anything yet from the ABC network to confirm the Bradbury connection, but it's been mentioned in a number of places such as this announcement in Variety. There's a bit more (but not much) about the series here. And here is the trailer:

Conference Presentation

I nearly forgot to blog this one...

On Saturday I presented another conference paper on Ray Bradbury. This one, at the second Edge Hill Short Story Conference, was about three Bradbury short stories which have been adapted many times for radio, film and television: "Mars is Heaven", "Zero Hour" and "The Veldt".

The aim of the paper was to gather some thoughts on why some stories retain their popularity through repeated re-tellings. There are two areas that intrigued me when I was doing the research for the paper, and I hope to follow up on these at a later date.

The first is that some of the stories work reasonably well even when stripped of their original background or "landscape". This thought occurred to me when listening to various cold-war era radio adaptations of "Zero Hour", which still work (just) without the science fictional background elements that feature prominently in Bradbury's short story.

The second is that Bradbury's poetic prose style - throwing out metaphor after metaphor in the white heat of progressing the narrative - invites an "inner life" for the story in the mind of the reader. This, I believe, is part of Bradbury's appeal to his readers. And since each reader will conjure up subtly different mental images as they read, so (possibly) the stories invite multiple, variant adaptations.

I am currently working on some more Bradbury papers (don't ask me how I find the time) for the proposed New Ray Bradbury Review. I understand that this is likely to see print early next year.

The Veldt: New Radio Adaptation

"I wrote The Veldt because my subconscious knew more about children than has often been told." Ray Bradbury wrote these words in his introduction to his stage play version of his classic story.

"The Veldt" tells the story of a futuristic nursery, where children are kept occupied by a virtual reality environment, which can conjure up any world they can imagine. The children's parents ultimately pay the price for offloading childcare responsbilities onto a machine.

Bradbury seems to have concocted this tale primarily as an observation on the potential for "evil" inherent in children. As such it is a companion piece to "Zero Hour", "The Small Assassin" and "The Playground". In all of these tales, children conspire to do bad things.

"The Veldt" has remained one of Bradbury's most popular stories, and has been adapted for radio, television and film many times. Its popularity back in the 1950s was giving a huge helping hand by the radio adaptations. These, no doubt, came about in part because Bradbury's nursery is an obvious analogy for the then new - and, to radio, threatening - medium of television.

Bradbury has little interest in technology, and probably didn't care that his story was criticised for technological implausibility. However, the story has been used many times over the years as an exemplar of virtual reality, and today's technology (particularly in interactive media) seems to have at last caught up with Bradbury's once implausible concept.

A "modernised" version of Bradbury's story has just been produced by BBC radio. It builds in some of our modern day concerns about how children waste/spend their time. In my view, little modernisation is really necessary, since Bradbury got the issues spot on in the original story. However, playwright Mike Walker has created a vibrant new version on the story. And anyway, I am always pleased to encounter a new dramatisation of a Bradbury story.

If you are quick, you can catch the play via the BBC's "Listen Again" feature by clicking here. The link will be valid until 28th May, after which the BBC will replace it with a different play.

Adaptations

I'm currently researching adaptations of three Bradbury stories: "Mars is Heaven!", "Zero Hour" and "The Veldt". It's for a paper I'm preparing to deliver at a conference in July.

I've chosen these particular stories because they seem to be recurringly popular, with repeated adaptations for radio and television.

"Mars is Heaven" is an interesting case because Bradbury himself has adapted it on more than one occasion. The original short story appeared in Planet Stories in 1948. Bradbury then converted it into "The Third Expedition", a chapter of his novelised story cycle The Martian Chronicles. In the 1960s he wrote the first of several screenplays of the Chronicles, and in the 1970s the stage play version. And in the 1980s he wrote a teleplay for Ray Bradbury Theater.

The story is unusual, in that it combines the small-town USA sensibilities of some of his other work (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes) with a Martian setting.

Listening to various radio adaptations, I have been intrigued that Ernest Kinoy's 1950s Dimension X/X Minus One script uses a rooster as the first signifier that the Earthmen might still be on Earth rather than on Mars. This element isn't present in Bradbury's short story, nor in The Martian Chronicles. However, in Bradbury's 1980s teleplay for Ray Bradbury Theater there's that rooster again. Has Bradbury borrowed from Kinoy? Or was Kinoy working from a different draft of Bradbury's story?