Sometimes, great chefs start with somebody else’s recipe–and then improvise like crazy to come up with a distinctive dish of their own.
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Making television shows can be like that too. Take “The Visitor,” a science-fiction drama premiering Fridays this fall on Fox. Scan through the pilot episode, and you can pick up on connections to movies as diverse as “The Fugitive,” “E.T.” and “Starman.”
Those connections are no accident, said Dean Devlin, one of the show’s executive producers. “We’ve never made any bones about the fact that we were highly influenced by certain films and that it’s why we wanted to get into the business,” he said. The “we” Devlin referred to includes his producing partner, Roland Emmerich. Their biggest movie success was “Independence Day.”
“So we don’t try to hide similarities,” acknowledged Devlin.
For “The Visitor,” Devlin and Emmerich are working with executive producer John Masius, whose writing/producing credits include “St. Elsewhere.” You also can see Masius’ name every week on the opening credits of “Touched by an Angel.” He wrote the original script for that show’s pilot episode, although he left the project before the show got on the air.
Devlin and Emmerich (and Fox) are looking to Masius to bring warmth and honest emotions to the show’s basic story of a man who suddenly turns up, apparently without having aged and with some extraordinary abilities, 50 years after disappearing during an Air Force mission over the Atlantic.
“One of the things that came up when Roland and I were talking about television and doing science fiction (is that) it tends to be very cold. It tends to be either very spooky or very hardware-driven,” Devlin said.
“We wanted it to be science fiction, but we wanted it to have some emotion to it. And that’s one of the main reasons we wanted to work with John.”
Masius said the essence of the show comes down to, as he says, “human potential and the idea that we have an ability within us to make the best of our lives.”
Adding dramatic potential to the show is the fact that the title character — Adam, played by John Corbett (Chris in “Northern Exposure”) — knew people 50 years ago, people who have aged while he has not. It is, Masius said, “the whole idea of the people you left behind, the person you were then versus the person you are now, how your situation would have changed if you had dealt with it differently.
“There’s a lot of levels to this character. There’s a lot of hope, and yet there’s a lot of regret. It’s a very complex situation he’s dealing with.”