Wayward Pines was M. Night Shyamalan’s first real television foothold, and it still feels like an important one. He directed the pilot, executive produced the series, and helped shape the tone of a show that begins like a missing-person mystery and then mutates into something much stranger, more dystopian, and more openly sci-fi.
Based on Blake Crouch’s books, the series ran for two seasons on Fox. Season 1 has the sharper shock of discovery. Season 2 opens the world wider and pushes the town into a different kind of power struggle. Either way, this is where his television language really starts taking shape.
Writers and Directors
Wayward Pines also matters because of the people shaping it behind the scenes. M. Night Shyamalan directed the pilot and helped establish the series’ look and mood, but the show kept pulling in writers and directors who knew how to handle suspense, paranoia, and the slow reveal of something deeply wrong under the surface.
The Duffer Brothers are an especially notable part of that mix. Before Stranger Things made Matt and Ross Duffer famous, they were already writing key Wayward Pines episodes like The Truth, Choices, Cycle, and A Reckoning. That is a real part of the show’s creative identity, because those episodes sit right inside the series’ biggest turns and most destabilizing reveals.
On the directing side, the show also brought in genre-friendly filmmakers like Brad Turner, Tim Hunter, Ti West, and Jennifer Lynch across its run. That combination of writers and directors helped give Wayward Pines its unnerving, tightly controlled feel from week to week.
In the U.S., Wayward Pines is available on Hulu and for digital purchase through Apple TV, Amazon Video, and Fandango at Home.
In This Section
Series Snapshot
- Network: Fox
- Original run: May 14, 2015 to July 27, 2016
- Seasons: 2
- Episodes: 20
- Based on: Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines books
- M. Night Shyamalan’s role: Pilot director and executive producer
More on this show: Soundtrack
Why did they cancel Wayward Pines? That show was so riveting that I binge watched the first 2 seasons! It’s killing me! Why would they do this to their fans and not conclude the series?
That’s a good question. Like most things, it comes down to money, and do they think that the cost of producing a third season, with the amount of money they’d make off of the show, that they’d make as much profit (or more) as doing something else with the same amount of money or less. That’s unfortunately how things work in all things.