It looks like Amazon is still at it as they’ve picked up William Gibson’s story The Peripheral and have started working on it. The basic premise of the show is what might happen if you changed the past just a little bit, tweaked something just enough to create an alternate reality where life wasn’t entirely unrecognizable but was still different enough to notice. In the show the main character begins to notice these minute shifts in her reality just enough as she starts to search for the source while attempting to deal with her own suddenly dark past. That’s the trick of changing things back in the day however, what you might have been now could be erased and you’d never know about it. That’s a very creepy thought.
Amazon might be onto something with this show. A lot of people do tend to wonder what might have happened if they’d done something different in their past, how their lives would have turned out and how they possibly would have been much happier or worse off depending on what that ‘something’ is. The alternate realities that could be composed from the ‘maybe’s’ and the ‘what-ifs’ are seemingly endless since there are changes that go from the most minute and unnoticeable to the grandest and most mind-bending variations possible. Honestly there’s no upper limit to how things could change, especially given the input of enough people that could possibly come in to work on this show. All you need is one moment in history and a decidedly interesting ‘what-if’ scenario and you’d have a story. It would be something that could go on and on and never really get boring since it could alter the course of history, destroy the world, or do absolutely nothing at all. Such changes could be entirely personal and have little effect upon the rest of the world so far as it continues to operate, or it could mean a catastrophe if that individual interacts with the wrong people and sets off a chain reaction.
If Amazon treats this story correctly it could go a long ways towards becoming one of the next breakout series that people will be talking about for some time to come. Of course that’s assuming that they will treat it correctly since quite honestly people are going by the book and running the same formula’s day in and day out. There’s always hope though that someone will eventually get it through their heads to go off script and step out of the box to deliver something that’s edgy enough and existential enough to challenge the way people think. The only trouble with the amount of showmanship, or lack thereof, in the series of today is that they don’t remember how to wow the audience. So much has been done throughout the history of TV to keep people watching that current viewers have become bored and adopted the ‘been there, seen that’ attitude. It’s time to shock them in a way that really gets their attention.
The story could be something worth watching.
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