With Josh Holloway as star and Carlton Cuse as co-creator, Colony is bound to inspire comparisons to Lost, the last project these two worked on together. When you learn what Colony is about, it'll be easy to see why.
Colony is set in the not-so-distant future in a Los Angeles occupied by a mysterious alien life force. Just as Lost's characters were confined to an eerie island, the inhabitants of Colony's L.A. are similarly constrained with huge metallic walls surrounding the city.
"Compression makes for good drama, doesn't it?" Holloway said in response to a question about his apparent preference for "claustrophobic" series during a roundtable interview with several reporters at New York Comic Con Friday.
However, unlike Lost, where the very basic premise of the show followed the characters as they attempted to get off that island, the main objective of Holloway's character in Colony, former FBI agent Will Bowman, won't necessarily be to try to escape occupation. The show is more about his personal struggle to decide whether to cooperate with this new government in order to be reunited with his son or look at the bigger picture and join the resistance to help the citizens of L.A.
Sounds pretty heavy, right? Well, high-concept shows like Lost and Colony also just happen to be Holloway's thing.
"I love a story where the audience knows as much about what's going on as the characters, and it's a slow reveal of the mysteries and what's happening, and you take the ride with me," Holloway said. "I love high-concept. I love exploration and where it can go with a character."
I'm getting ahead of myself here, but we'll have to wait and see if Cuse and co-creator Ryan Condal come up with a series finale as ambiguous and controversial as what Cuse and fellow showrunner Damon Lindelof wrote for Lost's final episode back in 2010. If you are one of those people that didn't like Lost's ending, Cuse doesn't really care.
"I fully expected that there was no possible ending to the show that would satisfy all the people that were out there, so when Damon and I sat down to write the finale, it was like let's do the version we want to do. Let's tell the story we want to tell," Cuse said during a roundtable interview at New York Comic Con. "I feel like we live in a time when so much emphasis is put on how things end. You know, I think that's not my view of the real criteria something should be judged. I think there were 121 hours of Lost, and hopefully it was an entertaining journey, and the journey was enjoyable. Some people liked it, some people didn't like it, but I think we worked hard to make the journey really engaging. I'm reconciled to the fact that it's OK some people don't like it."
Now, the only question that remains is if Colony is able to achieve the same phenomenal status as Lost when it premieres Jan. 14, 2016 on USA.
Find out more about Colony and its historical themes in the video of part of the roundtable interview at New York Comic Con below.
For more Comic Con news, check out T-Lounge coverage of New York Comic Con 2015.
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