Okay, perhaps the title of the article is a tad misleading, but here’s something for sci-fi/fantasy geeks everywhere to get excited about: J.J. Abrams is developing Rod Serling’s final screenplay, titled THE STOPS ALONG THE WAY, for television. His Bad Robot production company is planning on making it into an event series through their deal at Warner Bros.
It must be stated that we’re not entirely sure if this is a “genre” project or not, but the combination of Abrams and Serling is impossible to resist. We’ll hopefully find out more soon; all details are under wraps.
According to Deadline, Serling talked about the project in his final interview four months before his death when he was asked if he had a script he has special feeling for. “I just wrote The Stops Along the Way, which is, I think, a lovely script.”
We don’t doubt that for a second, Rod.
For his part, Abrams has always let his fondness for Serling and “The Twilight Zone” be known. Here’s a portion of his Wired.com interview from 2007:
Rod Serling, for me, is the inspiration for a number of reasons but, fundamentally, he understood that amazing combination of pure pulp and deep character. And the respect he had for character and the audience was enormous. He would write about things that mattered to him in allegory and tell tales about aliens and monsters, but they were almost always about subjects that mattered to him — whether it was the terror of the Russians, whether it was the mystery and fear and hunger for space travel, whether it was racism or politics, or whatever it was he was always grappling with.