Lost’s Yunjin Kim Developing Adapting Korean Time Travel Drama Nine: Nine Time Travels
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It looks like Lost star Yunjin Kim may be itching for some more sci-fi weirdness in her life. She currently stars on ABC’s sultry prime time soap opera Mistresses, a show many of us may find strange in completely different ways, but now she is working with the network to develop an American version of the Korean time travel drama Nine: Nine Time Travels. Let’s hope they do something to smooth out that title.
According to Deadline, Kim brought the project to Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the duo behind the likes of Gossip Girl and The O.C., and their Fake Empire banner. Derek Simonds is set to scribble the show, which as of yet hasn’t been renamed. The story is “part thriller, part epic love story, centers on a man with the ability to travel 20 years back in time who, in trying to alter a murder which destroyed his family, sets off a chain of events that impact the woman he loves and threatens his own life. He embarks on an odyssey through time to make things right.”
That’s a broad, but promising concept. It does sound a little like damn near every time travel story ever told—he’s trying to set things right, but screws everything up worse than before—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done well. If your characters are good and your story is strong, you can do a lot, even if the set-up is something you’ve seen before.
This won’t be Schwartz and Savage’s first weirdness rodeo, either. The two worked on Rockne S. O’Bannon’s short-lived CW series Cult earlier this year. Though that show failed to find an audience and was quickly cancelled, it definitely tried to do something different from everything else on TV. Perhaps they’ll infuse their new time travel joint with some of that ambition. Lost certainly pulled off more than its fair share of innovative approaches.
Nine: Nine Time Travels is known for ambiguous endings, for concluding the action in such a way as to leave the events open to the interpretation of the audience. While that sounds all well and good on the surface—a show that makes you actively engage your brain—it also seems like it could be incredibly frustrating to deal with obtuse, uncertain endings week after week after week. We’ll see how this all shakes out further on down the road.
This show, whatever name it winds up bearing, is just in development, so, as you all know, it could simply evaporate somewhere along the line and never be heard from again. But it sounds like an interesting premise, one that could yield another good sci-fi project, which is always a bonus in our books.
