Fox Will Channel Inception With New Potential Sci-Fi Series
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What if there was a way to enter the minds of the recently dead and bring them back to life…but only for a short time? Anyone who has lost someone close to them would no doubt jump at the chance for even a few more minutes with that person, especially if the person died suddenly and without a sense of “closure.” This notion is at the core of Doctors, a new science fiction TV project from…(checks notes)…Fox. Well, damn.
THR reveals that Fox has snagged the TV rights to indie comic creator Dash Shaw’s graphic novel Doctors, which was published just last month. The book is about one Dr. Cho, who has created a device that lets him and his team infiltrate a dead person’s fading consciousness in the form of a memory and resurrect them briefly. In the graphic novel, Cho is hired by a woman to bring back her mother, who was killed in a random accident. The scientist hits a snag when the mother doesn’t want to come back at all. See, in the world of Doctors, the dying “unconsciously create the afterlife they want, or feel they deserve, in their minds before everything fades to black.” So the question is posed: is it right to drag them back out of that fleeting final bit of happiness, even if it isn’t real?
I’m guessing that specific storyline will serve as the plot for the eventual pilot episode, and the show, if picked up, will then adopt a “corpse of the week” format that will dig deeper into the moral and ethical quandaries such a technology would raise. I can see Doctors becoming really fascinating in the right hands. It sounds like it could play out a bit like Inception: The Series, which is no bad thing in my opinion. The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is Fox, a network notorious for greenlighting intriguing genre series and then cutting them down just as swiftly. Still, they have had a few long-lasting genre hits in recent years, such as Fringe and Sleepy Hollow, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed for Doctors.
David Goyer is producing Doctors via his Phantom Four production company, but there’s no word on a writer yet. It’s entirely possible Goyer will handle that part of the equation himself, as he’s a well-established screenwriter at this point. He wrote the Man of Steel script and co-wrote both Batman Begins and next year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (he also shared story credit on Christopher Nolan’s second and third Batman films). On the TV front, he created FlashForward, Starz’s Da Vinci’s Demons, and Fox’s DC comics adaptation Constantine, which premieres tomorrow night.
