Hugh Jackman: TV Producer

November 29, 2006

Here's an odd little piece we saw over at Variety.com. Apparantly, Hugh Jackman is going to produce a show for CBS that is a "dark" version of "The Love Boat."

Wha? Huh?

What CBS means by "dark," is pretty unclear. They are saying that the show will have a "Rashomon"-style format. Yeah, we didn't know what that meant either, so we looked into it. Turns out -- this is a reference to Kurosawa movie from 1950 where the same events were shown from different perspectives.

Wikipedia has this to say: (Rashomon) has an unusual narrative structure that reflects the impossibility of obtaining the truth about an event when there are conflicting witness accounts. In English and other languages, Rashomon has become a byword for any situation in which the truth of an event is difficult to verify due to the conflicting accounts of different witnesses.

So, it's a show centering around the passengers on a high-end cruise line, wherein it's hard to tell what actually happened because the story is told from several points of view. So, nobody is worried about the Norwalk virus? Or perhaps they're all just REALLY worried about the Norwalk virus? It depends on who you ask, we suppose.

"We were looking for a new way to tell a story on the small screen, and Max hit on it with this idea," Jackman said of the project. Palermo said the hour will combine elements of both serialized and self-contained series.

We have to say, we're actually intrigued by this description.