So you've woken up in a mysterious place with eight strangers and you can't get out. What do you do now?

Summer has already begun with new, probably doomed but possibly interesting programming, and last night’s offering was the pilot of NBC’s new show Persons Unknown. In it, strangers wake up in a creepy abandoned hotel and discover they’ve been trapped in a piece of a fake-looking isolated main street, with no idea how they got there, why they’re there, or who did this to them. When they try to leave by walking past the border of the town, they collapse and are ferried back to town by some nice men who only speak Chinese and who then cook them a lovely Chinese meal in the town’s creepy abandoned Chinese restaurant. The meal ends with fortune cookies containing various odd messages, the most notable being:

Gotcha. So to recap: strangers stuck in a weird fake town blanketed by surveillance will now be forced to kill each other for mysterious reasons. At the moment, the fortune cookie message and the shots of surveillance footage have me leaning toward a Most Dangerous Game/Hunger Games scenario for why these people have been trapped in the middle of nowhere, but I’d love to be surprised. The several earlier iterations of this idea have had some good results and often garnered strong audience responses (starting with The Prisoner, of course, but also Lost and many others), but I have a hard time understanding why anyone would continue to make television shows with this premise when all of the other attempts have fallen victim to the same problem. Everyone likes the beginning when the whole thing is mysterious and unknown, but that grace period lasts an extremely short time (and I think that grace period gets shorter every time this premise gets re-used). At some point, either the show has to keep twisting back on itself to retain the mystery, or it has to make it appear as though some answers are forthcoming. And then that bit can only last for so long until answers have to actually be forthcoming. And then the show is over.

What is this strange town? And how did we get here?

This premise is ideal for films, for novels, and even for miniseries, but it’s just fraught with problems for serialized television. It must be incredibly difficult to keep something like this exciting for long enough to get a show renewed, but it must be even harder to keep a mysterious island story exciting indefinitely. To be fair, it’s likely that neither of those problems are among NBC’s concerns. What they need right now is a show that’s cheap to make (mostly one large unchanging set, no big expensive celebrities on the cast – check) and will fill some time until fall when they can get the main season shows started again. Persons Unknown has not been given the programming slot, marketing push, or star power of a long-running show. From that perspective, the premise may not be such a bad idea. If you know you’ve got a limited life span, why not actually write a show with an ending?

Oh yes, someone is watching. BUT WHO?!

Who knows if that’s the plan behind Persons Unknown, or if it has some other scheme for coping with the long-term planning problems that come packaged with the “strangers trapped in a mysterious place” plotline? For now, the problem of how you do a story like this on television is still a near-perfect mirror of the premise itself – they are both puzzles that have yet to be solved.