Amazon’s action series “The Terminal List” launches this week with the entire eight-episode run kicking off on Friday.
Based on Jack Carr’s bestseller, the story follows a Navy SEAL (Chris Pratt) who is the sole survivor of a high-stakes covert mission gone wrong. Conflicting memories of the event and questions about his culpability lead him to uncover evidence of dark forces working against him and his family.
The project feels like the kind of throwback story that would normally be turned into a feature ala “American Assassin”. However whilst promoting the series, Pratt spoke with Coming Soon about the biggest advantages of shooting such a story in a long-form episodic format:
“If you have to take this eight hours and pare it down to an hour and a half with all the story, each of the ancillary characters would be cut down to basically nothing but people who are showing up to puppeteer exposition.
That’s sort of the fault of the format of the film. At an hour and a half, maybe two, two and a half hours at its longest, you can’t quite tell the same story in the same way with the same depth of emotion and development of character. So yeah, I really love this. I love the emerging medium of long-form episodic format, but with the production value of a film.”
Constance Wu, Taylor Kitsch, Jai Courtney, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Riley Keough, Arlo Mertz, JD Pardo, Patrick Schwarzenegger, LaMonica Garrett, Stephen Bishop, Sean Gunn, Tyner Rushing, Jared Shaw, Christina Vidal, Nick Chinlund, Matthew Rauch, Warren Kole and Alexis Louder co-star in the series which Pratt, Antoine Fuqua and Jon Schumacher executive produce.
