J.J. Abrams Is Creating A New Sci-Fi TV Series, So Commence Your Bitching Accordingly

J.J. Abrams gets an absolutely terrible rap on the internet but, really, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. It seems like everything that becomes successful is ultimately hated on these here internets, and is there any director in the fanboy circle who has found as much genre success as J.J. Abrams? He created a TV sensation in Lost. He got the chance to direct TWO Star Trek films AND two Star Wars films. He produces Mission: Impossible, owns one of the most prolific production companies in the world (Bad Robot), and has ultimate carte blanche to make pretty much whatever comes to mind. That level of notoriety and success was bound to create some detractors…but, man, with J.J. Abrams, it’s a bit much. Some geeks really have it out for the guy, and it makes me super uncomfortable to seee.

Because, you know what? I love J.J. Abrams. He makes things I like, is a fantastic blockbuster director who excels at pacing and character creation, and even more importantly, has commissioned some of my favorite pieces of genre storytelling in the modern age. From Westworld to Cloverfield, Abrams is a man who seems to love big, grand sci-fi stories. And I give him props for using his celebrity to make as much of it as he can possibly can. But even with a busy personal schedule of writing and directing Star Wars: Episode IX, producing a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek film, and doing a billion other things, Abrams has somehow found a way to add another big project to the pile.

But, even more so than his franchise commitments, this seems to be a concept close to Abrams heart. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Abrams is currently shopping around the idea for a new sci-fi show, an original concept that he has apparently written the script for. This is notable — even though Abrams remains a huge TV presence with the stuff he produces, he hasn’t actually created a TV show since 2010’s Undercovers. You remember Undercovers? It had Gugu Mbatha Raw in it. It was very much unnoteworthy.

But hopefully this project won’t be, as it will be Abram’s return to telling an original sci-fi story. He hasn’t done that since 2011’s Super 8, and hasn’t done it on TV since 2008’s Fringe. But considering how AMAZING Fringe is (seriously, one of the all-time great shows that criminally gets so little love), I am super excited to see what Abrams is cooking up with this one. No surprise there’s not a lot of details about the show so far, but THR did release the following vague plot synopsis:

[The show] is about a family — consisting of a mother who works as a scientist, her husband and their young daughter — who all get into a terrible car crash. After the mother winds up in a coma, her daughter begins digging through her experiments in the basement and winds up being transported to another land amid a world’s battle against a monstrous, oppressive force. Her father then follows her into this new world.

Transported to a new land? Sounds promisingly Lost-y. And the mad scientist, experiment angle? That was right up Fringe’s alley. Hopefully this show will tell a different story than those two but, even if it doesn’t, it has my interest based on Abram’s involvement alone.

And I am far from the only one who feels that way — already both HBO and Apple (who is a television creator now, apparently) are trying to bid for the rights to the show, and I doubt they will be the only ones who do so. Love him or hate him, based on his past experience, you can’t deny that J.J. Abrams is good business.

…I mean, mostly. After all, he did produce Alcatraz…