Bruce Greenwood plays the missing TV host. (ABC)
While their new ABC mystery/horror/action-adventure show “The River,” which premieres Tuesday night, takes place in the Amazon jungle, show runners Michael Green and Zack Estrin had good reason not to film there.
“The Amazon is an incredibly dangerous place,” says Green. “We had our researchers look into it, and now we have a packet in the writers’ room called ‘1000 Ways the Amazon Will Kill You.’ Diseases, bugs, animals — if we actually went to the Amazon, Zack and I would be dead within 45 minutes.”
The safer environment of Puerto Rico was then chosen as a more appropriate location for the filming of the pilot, which establishes the disappearance of Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), longtime host of the nature adventure show “The Undiscovered Country,” who has been pronounced dead after several months. Just as his family, whose lives were captured on-camera, is set to move on, Cole’s beacon goes off. This sets his wife Tess (Leslie Hope) and adult son Lincoln (Joe Anderson) off on a quest to see if Cole is really alive.
To fund the trip, they allow Cole’s longtime crew to film it, leading to much agitation for Lincoln, who long ago removed himself from his father’s televised jungle world.
“The River” then deals with mystical wonders, as the search party learns that Cole had been involved with as-yet-undefined, black-magic-type forces. (Readers of Joseph Conrad will not be surprised that the show runners thought of Cole as a cross between Kurtz from “Heart of Darkness” and the late Animal Planet host Steve Irwin.) In their travels they encounter haunted dolls, possessed teddy bears, malevolent bodies of water and an invisible deadly force that whips through the trees around them.
Somehow, claim the showrunners, these evil forces, many of which they’d researched for use on the show, actually found their way onto the set.
Thomas Kretschmann, who plays the expedition’s security chief, was in a location the crew had heard was haunted, and was injured in a mystifying fashion.
“He’s an athletic, physically fit guy who doesn’t just fall for no reason,” says Estrin, who swears to The Post that he’s not just making this stuff up for publicity. “We were told there was a ghost there known for pushing and hitting people, and he felt like someone hit his foot with a hammer. He ended up breaking his foot in a way that made no sense. It creeped everyone out.”
Hope also had an otherworldly experience. After filming the pilot near a burial ground, she developed a strange back pain that was only cured after she visited a shaman who diagnosed her with a “minor possession,” and gave her an amulet that she wore for the rest of the season.
While Anderson didn’t experience anything supernatural, he did note that the set’s eerie locales took their toll.
“We were shooting in this abandoned mental institution,” he says. “It was a very strange place on top of a mountain, and the people who look after it say it was haunted. When it was a facility, two of the nurses killed one of the doctors because he was abusing one of the kids. This spread like wildfire around the crew, and one of the security guys who had to stay there overnight to watch the equipment bailed. He couldn’t handle it.”
Whatever the truth about the show’s otherworldly disturbances, the actors did face dangers of a far more believable nature.
“This is the most physical job I’ve done,” says Anderson, a British actor who appears in such action-heavy films as the second “Twilight” movie, and Liam Neeson’s new hit, “The Grey.”
“Unless it’s a massive stunt, everything we can possibly do, they’ll allow us to do,” he says. “It’s exciting, but it’s tough because you’re climbing mountains every day, and trudging through jungles. This will probably be the most extreme thing I’ve done in terms of stamina and athleticism.”
“The River” came to be after Steven Spielberg suggested to “Paranormal Activity” creator Oren Peli that they work together on a television show. Peli revived an old feature idea about a family searching for a loved one in the Amazon.
Given that “The River” is an action/adventure show on ABC that is shot in Hawaii, where the series moved after the pilot, and features characters dealing with mysterious jungle monsters, some may consider the show too reminiscent of “Lost.” But despite a malevolent, invisible presence that bears similarities to a certain smoke monster, Green and Estrin insist that their show is not a copy.
“We’re not saying we’re gonna be searching for Emmet Cole for six years,” adds Estrin. “There are many chapters to this journey, and the show is called ‘The River,’ not ‘The Search for Emmet Cole.’ The question goes a lot further beyond him. So don’t expect us to drag that quest out for too long.”
Which brings the show runners to another difficult point – the possibility of a short life. Viewers of serialized shows like AMC’s “Rubicon” or NBC’s “The Event” have been disappointed in recent years when the shows were cancelled after one season, leaving unanswered questions in the process.
While they certainly hope “The River” lives as long as “Lost,” they promise that if it should meet an early demise, fans will still be satisfied with the ending.
“We have a theoretical plan for the ultimate ending, and we have the freedom to condense that to however many episodes we are graced to tell,” says Estrin. “As far as this first season, we wanted to create a real sense of a completed story — with an opening for a continual journey.”
THE RIVER
Tuesday, 9 p.m., ABC