Chad Hodge and the Mysterious World of 'Wayward Pines'

In this bonus episode of The Spin-off, we focus on the new Fox drama Wayward Pines. The show is based on a series of mystery novels by Blake Crouch. In the TV version, Matt Dillon plays a US Secret Service agent trying to get to the bottom of the disappearance of two federal agents in a small-town Idaho...where he quickly figures out that not everything is as perfect as it seems on the surface in the town of Wayward Pines.

Think Twin Peaks meets M. Night Shyamalan. In fact, the filmmaker behind The Sixth Sense and Signs is an executive producer on the show and directed the pilot.

Michael Schneider recently sat down with the man who developed Wayward Pines for television, writer and producer Chad Hodge, at an event sponsored by the Northwestern University Entertainment Alliance (both Schneider and Hodge are Northwestern alums). They talked what drew Hodge to the story and how he decided to structure the show -- each episode ends and the next episode begins in the same moment. And what’s more, Wayward Pines reveals most of its secrets by Episode 5 -- and unconventional move indeed.

For Hodge, Wayward Pines has been a labor of love. He told Schneider he was determined to adapt the story for television from the moment he first encountered the book three years ago.