NBC’s latest series, “Awake,” puts a sci-fi spin on procedural dramas by using the time-tested concept of alternate realities as a backdrop for solving crimes.
The series begins after homicide detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs), his wife Hanna (Laura Allen) and teenage son, Rex (Dylan Minnette), get into a car accident that only Britten and Hanna survive.
As terrible as the loss of a child is for a parent to grapple with, things actually get worse. Britten starts to have vivid dreams in which Rex lives but Hanna dies.
He can’t figure out which of these two scenarios is real and which is the dream — living wife and dead son or dead wife and living son — since they are woven together so seamlessly in his mind.
“He literally goes to sleep in a world where his wife survived and wakes up in a world where his son survived,” says series executive producer Howard Gordon (“24” and “Homeland”).
“What’s fascinating is that it’s not like he has a choice about which of the worlds he wants to live in,” Gordon says.
Gordon notes this because Britten gets to be with his wife and his son, but just not all of them together.
“Britten is very un-incentivized to figure out which is which, and that has a price. He goes a little bit bananas trying to keep up with both of the realities,” Gordon says.
Since each episode flows back and forth between the twin realities, creating what one of Britten’s two therapists (one for each reality, of course) calls a mental Mobius strip, Britten uses different colors as shorthand for the world he’s currently operating in.
For viewers, that’s literally represented in alternating production design. The red world, filmed with a warm palette, is Hanna’s province; the green world, featuring cooler tones is Rex’s habitat.
Sounds like a lot for the average viewer to keep track of, but Gordon promises that “Awake” isn’t the kind of show that’s laced with subtle, distracting clues aimed at revealing which of the two dream worlds is the real world.
“We don’t want to drive people crazy with that riddle,” he says, “And, if anything, we want people to be emotionally invested in both realities, like Britten, who wants both worlds to be real.”
Along the way, Britten’s experiences in one world begin to influence the other, particularly when it comes to his professional life as a cop. He solves crimes with his red-world partner (played by Wilmer Valderrama) or his green-world partner (Steve Harris).
“It doesn’t take long before Britten discovers that there are crossovers with people, clues and details that inform the cases that he works on,” Gordon says, “which gives him case-breaking insight that’s almost a superpower.”
Yet Gordon insists that “Awake” isn’t a sci-fi series.
“It’s a procedural with a very interesting psychological twist,” he says, “and it’s rooted in something that we all understand, which is dreams. The reality of dreams is something everyone can understand.”
“We’ve all had very vivid dreams, but we orient ourselves when we wake up,” Gordon says. “But, what if we had such vivid recurring dreams that we never knew whether we were awake or asleep?
One of [Britten’s] worlds is a reflection of his unconscious and we’ve never seen the inside of a person’s mind on a show quite like this.”
AWAKE
Thursday, 10 p.m., NBC