“Reverie,” a science fiction drama creator Mickey Fisher describes as “somewhere between the highly emotional tone of `This Is Us’ and the big ideas and big adventure of a genre show like `Timeless,”’ premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday evening on NBC.
The high-concept immersive-reality drama stars Sarah Shahi as Mara Kint, a hostage negotiator and expert on human behavior turned college professor whose former boss (Dennis Haysbert) recruits her to a tech company to save ordinary people who have lost themselves in a highly advanced immersive virtual-reality program in which you can live out your wildest dreams.
“Every week we’re going to explore a new and different cinematic world with a big emotional mystery at the center — why did this person get stuck and how does Mara help them move on,” said Fisher, who created the 2014-15 CBS science fiction series “Extant.”
“We are also over the course of the season, telling a bigger serialized emotional and psychological story about what happens to Mara as a result of this new job.”
Fisher told City News Service he got the idea for “Reverie” through reading about virtual reality “and how companies like Facebook were spending billions of dollars on it with the plan that we would spend more and more time in it.”
Fisher said he then ordered the virtual reality platform Google Cardboard and within minutes of setting it up “was transported from my living room to a jungle.”
“I thought if we are in the silent movie days of VR, we have a problem because eventually, once it gets to where you can have everything your heart desires in VR, who would want to come back?” Fisher said.
Fisher called “Reverie” “a story for the time we are living in right now.”
“We live in a technological age that comes with choices and consequences, and at the heart of this show is a theme about the importance of human connection and the responsibility that comes with those choices,” Fisher said. “But it’s not dystopic or didactic, it’s fun, it’s inclusive, it’s engaging and emotional.”