Art imitating strife

THE best fiction mirrors reality, but sometimes reality can shatter the glass. The pilot of ABC’s highly anticipated new drama “Invasion” chronicles the chaos of a hurricane as it hits a small town in southern Florida. The show is billed as science fiction and, as the title implies, more is at work than just extreme weather, including a shower of odd lights that seem to become luminescent water creatures of a less-than-friendly nature, and the unsettling personality transformation of certain characters caught out in the storm.

But if the hurricane in “Invasion” has only a fraction of the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina, there is still no getting around the fact that much of the pilot is filled with images of now all-too-familiar relentless winds, fleeing residents, blown-out windows and the Red Cross station aftermath of a great disaster. Which means ABC now faces a fairly rare decision: Is their science-fiction show too realistic to be appropriate at this time of national tragedy?

As of the Wednesday after Hurricane Katrina’s assault on New Orleans, ABC officials had pulled promos for the show and issued a statement expressing concern for victims of the tragedy, adding that the network was looking at all its programming and marketing efforts to “assess sensitivities.” The show’s debut is scheduled for Sept. 21, although that could change.

In the days after the hurricane, creator Shaun Cassidy declined to discuss the show, saying it was inappropriate to focus on the fate of a television show when so many were suffering. The characters of “Invasion,” he added, were dealing with getting the water and electricity back on, not the life-and-death issues so many Americans now face.

It is not, of course, the first time real-life events have overtaken entertainment. After the 9/11 attacks, several movies, including the $80-million “Collateral Damage,” were held for months while television shows that dealt with terrorism or other threats to the state (including “The Agency,” which Cassidy produced, and “24”) had to either rewrite or scramble for episodes that would not seem exploitive or inappropriate during a time of national shock and mourning.

Not every instance of fiction/reality crossover has been preempted or unsuccessful: “Incendiary,” a debut novel by Chris Cleave that details a bloody terrorist bombing of London, appeared weeks after this summer’s actual subway-bombing tragedy and is being hailed by many as prescient and even wise.

DEFINING THE TERMS

IN an interview several weeks ago, Cassidy said that the theme of “Invasion” is how people relate to each other during a crisis and how they put the pieces back together after a great upheaval.

“Invasion,” he said, could refer to many things. Yes, there is an alien element, but define “alien” -- during any national disaster and what was once unimaginable becomes commonplace, the line between reality and fantasy erased by the force of the calamity.

For more than a decade, the former teen idol has been working as a television writer and producer, tinkering with the line between fantasy and reality in shows as disparate as “Roar” (a 5th century Celtic drama starring Heath Ledger) and “American Gothic,” the critically acclaimed Southern horror thriller.

Like “Invasion,” which bears as much resemblance to “Family” as it does to “The X-Files,” Cassidy is difficult to categorize. David E. Kelley probably doesn’t have to sign anyone’s old lunchbox, but Cassidy sure does (along with album covers, posters and other memorabilia). Yet there is a certain continuity to his shape-shifting career -- if nothing else, he is a child of the lot. Cassidy’s offices are in Warner Village, an odd, Stepford-like cluster of clapboard “houses” on the studio’s lot. So he can eat lunch in the nearby “town square,” where he hung out with his mother, Shirley Jones, while she filmed “The Music Man.”

“If you need to belong to a larger group, which you do and which is often difficult in Los Angeles,” he said, “the lot really isn’t a bad way to go.”

With “Invasion,” Cassidy hopes to tell a story of survival and family and community -- “all the biggies” -- using the extreme nature of a natural disaster to throw the images large. Despite the ready rock-star smile, he takes it all seriously -- the themes, the narrative, the exercise of storytelling. Next to a photo of him, Jones and a very young Ron Howard is a copy of Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” which he says he was recently perusing for narrative form and atmosphere. On his desk is a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment,” an unlikely primer for someone writing about aliens.

“Invasion,” he said, is closer in pacing, and perhaps intent, to “24,” and it’s as character-driven as “Lost,” though perhaps not so amorphous. With an ensemble cast of relative newcomers headed by William Fichtner (“Empire Falls,” “The Longest Yard”), the episodes are not self-contained; stories from each character’s point of view will move from week to week, and because it is a series rather than a miniseries, there will be no final, stunning conclusion. The first season will follow the attempts to survive the aftermath of the hurricane that occurs in the pilot. “I like to think of it as a family suspense thriller,” Cassidy said, “but there’s also a clock on it. It is a very tight and definite time frame. And yes, there’s a mystery, but what you think the mystery is changes. Like in life.”

HALLUCINATORY REALISM

A family suspense thriller -- non-episodic, with a shifting perspective and no clear antagonist -- would not be, in normal TV times, an easy sell. At least not to a network. But Cassidy pitched the pilot the day after “Lost” premiered. That line between fantasy and reality? Forget it. Give us tropical polar bears and self-healing powers, give us physical manifestations of our greatest fears and secrets, keep us wondering if the world is just a personal hallucination after all. “The scariest things are the things grounded in reality,” Cassidy says. “You tell nine truths, and the 10th is a lie. The trick is to disguise the lie so the audience is unsure which is the truth.”

Science fiction has always been about reflecting our fears in a funhouse mirror; Ray Bradbury, perhaps the modern master of this, used everything from a murderous baby to history-changing butterflies. “The Everglades is just unworldly, and the town where we filmed the pilot has survived so many hurricanes it’s commonplace to them,” Cassidy said. “But even so, the aftermath of a hurricane has an otherworldly feel. Plenty of strange things happen that are actually rooted in science and reality.”

The message the show aims to impart with all the tension and symbolism and possible appearance of extraterrestrials? “That hope springs eternal, that we’re living in a frightening time but that there is a way for us to pull together.”