English Entertainment
Star World Premiere HD to bring back S2 of Wayward Pines
MUMBAI: Star World Premiere HD is bringing back the the second season of Wayward Pines from May 27 onwards, 10 pm every Friday
Wayward Pines is an adaptation of the Wayward Pines novels by eminent sci-fi and mystery author Blake Crouch. The show in its first season managed to serenade sci-fi fans with impeccable direction by M Night Shyamalan and a stellar star cast that included Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Matt Dillon who starred in wildly successful ventures like There’s Something About Mary (1998), Crash (2004), Factotum (2005), You, Me and Dupree (2006), Nothing but the Truth (2008).
The second season haswith stars like two time Academy Award nominee Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond), Jason Patric (Speed,My Sister’s Keeper) and BAFTA nominated Nimrat Kaur ( Airlift, Lunch Box) joining the ranks. The upcoming season is set to be a glitzy affair.
Wayward Pines season one traced the adventures of Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon), a U.S. Secret Service agent, who was investigating the mystery of the disappearance of his two colleagues. As his search leads him to the quaint little town of Wayward Pines, he awakens from a car accident only to find out that one of his colleagues is dead, the other, his former beau Kate Hewson (Carla Gugino) is living a rustic life in the town and all is not as it seems in the mysterious town. The town has sinister secrets and there seems to be something nefarious brewing just under the surface.
While the first season ended at crossroads, with a civil war at the horizon where do the new characters fit in? It is well-known that the town of Wayward Pines exists in a post-apocalyptic future 2000 years from now, it is populated by folks who have been kept in suspended animation all that time and thawed out as required. So when the brilliant but eccentric doctor Theo Yedlin (Jason Patrick) wakes up groggily thinking it was only the previous night that his marriage with wife Rebecca (Nimrat Kaur) was falling apart at a holiday resort in Hawaii, he is quick to realize that something is rotten in Wayward Pines. As Yedlin replaces the town’s recently deceased physician, he begins navigating his baffling new surroundings.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Yedlin (Nimrat Kaur), Theo’s wife and a former architect has already begun her work as the town’s beautician in the three years she’s been awake before her husband’s emergence.
Speaking of his role, Jason Patric said, “I did not watch the previous season because one of the things about my character, Theo Yedlin, who is a surgeon, is that he has been dropped right in the middle of it all so his reactions need to be as pure as possible.I don’t have any definitive ideas about who he is or where he’s going, but I think that was one of the interesting things about choosing to do this project.”
Nimrat Kaur also spoke about her role on the show, “I play the role of Rebecca, an architect who has designed the town of Wayward Pines. I am not one of the characters who wakes up unaware of what the place is like. Rebecca is someone who has a very complicated and intriguing journey on the show; she wakes up in Wayward Pines and copes up with her life there and struggles with her relationship with her husband while trying to find the perfect balance between everything.”
With Theo, Rebecca and a historian (DjimonHounsou) having just come out of the slumber and entered the fold, how do their characters fit in and where does their loyalty lie? Will their entry have a domino effect on the events unfurling in the show?
The series has been nominated for the prestigious Saturn Awards in numerous categories and holds a rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
