“Wrecked”
Premieres at 7 p.m. today on TBS
The homage dreamed up by the creators of the new TBS comedy “Wrecked” — brothers Justin and Jordan Shipley — is about as subtle as a plane crash.
On a remote, tropical island.
With survivors screaming on a beach amid flaming wreckage as a jet engine whines.
Even the title of their pilot episode — “All’s Not Lost” — tips a hat at TV history.
“Wrecked,” which premieres at 7 p.m. today, follows a group of plane crash survivors, none of whom is as good-looking, charming or skilled as the characters that inspired them: the ensemble from ABC’s “Lost,” which filmed six seasons in Hawaii from 2004 to 2010.
The Shipleys imagined a different ensemble surviving their crash. In “Lost” a doctor takes charge of the survivors. In “Wrecked” it’s a flight attendant.
“For us it felt like a very fun subversion to follow the lovable idiots,” said Justin Shipley, who at 27 is the older of the two brothers from Kansas City, Kan. “It felt like our comedic entry point.”
They were in high school when ABC’s “Lost” took TV by storm in 2004 with quirky mysteries the brothers tried to solve themselves. When they decided they wanted to break into the world of TV dramas three years ago, they kept thinking of “Lost” — and how they could give it a comic twist.
“This was us tweaking it slightly,” said Jordan Shipley, 25, who joined his brother in a phone interview from Chicago, where they had gone for a wedding. “Not a doctor, but a flight attendant with no skills, and then following how that would actually play out.”
Justin Shipley, who graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in drama, knew he wanted to someday write for TV or film. His brother, who has a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas, wanted to be involved somehow in comedy.
In Los Angeles they worked day jobs — Jordan Shipley kept getting fired from his, he said — and wrote whenever they could. They didn’t have any real training, so they read a lot of scripts, said Justin Shipley.
“‘Wrecked’ is the very first thing we wrote,” he said. “We got very lucky.”
Lucky indeed. They had met a producer who managed writers, and he sent their script to TBS.
The pilot was shot in January 2015, but the rest of the 10-episode season was shot this year, from January to March in Puerto Rico.
It draws from a nine-member cast: Asif Ali (Pack), Zach Cregger (Owen), Rhys Darby (Steve), Brooke Dillman (Karen), Ginger Gonzaga (Emma), Will Greenberg (Todd), Jessica Lowe (Florence), Ally Maki (Jess) and Brian Sacca (Danny).
The Shipleys wanted “Wrecked” to look and feel like a drama until the characters start talking. That meant the series literally had to have a “Lost” tone.
“We wanted to stay away from the traditional sitcom music,” Jordan Shipley said. “So we ended up borrowing things, and we wound up with the drony sound of ‘Lost.’”
But when the characters speak, the Shipleys hear themselves. When they thought of “Lost,” they often wondered which characters they would play. Would they be a hero or, as Justin Shipley called them, “one of the dummies”?
“When Jordan and I would talk about had we been on that island,” he said, “we very quickly realized we would have died almost immediately.”
