Cruise ship slasher comedy Wrecked coming to BBC Three
- Wrecked, a comedy-horror series set aboard a cruise ship, is coming to BBC Three
- The six episodes will follow Jamie, who joins the ship's crew in search of his missing sister
- Writer Ryan J Brown says "the kills are brutal" in the show, and "the laughs are loud"
BBC Three has commissioned a comedy-horror series set aboard a cruise ship.
Wrecked has been created by Ryan J Brown, a winner of the BAFTA Rocliffe writing award in 2017, with the six-part thriller set to film later this year in Northern Ireland.
Made by Euston Films (Minder) and "mixing comedy with a slice of slasher", Wrecked is set aboard a giant cruise ship, a luxury liner with everything - glamorous entertainers making guest's dreams come true, a vague, unsettling sense of menace and young, exhausted members of the crew going missing or turning up dead.
Casting for the 45-minutes episodes are expected to be announced soon.
The series follows nineteen-year-old new recruit, Jamie, as he joins the crew in search of his missing sister. She was working aboard the same vessel on a previous tour and never made it home. Jamie is initiated into cruise life and gets a crash course on the teen tribes within the staff: the theatre kids, the drop-outs, the low-paid workers from developing nations.
For this overworked and underpaid crew, life below deck is an odyssey of partying and excess and they remain oblivious to the bloodthirsty murders taking place on board. Jamie is forced to turn detective and uncover the sinister truth that runs as wide and deep as the ocean he's trapped on.
Brown, who co-wrote a couple of episodes of Diary Of A Badman star Humza Arshad's 2017 BBC Three comedy Coconut, said: "I'm incredibly excited to be setting sail with the BBC and Euston Films. In Wrecked, the kills are brutal, the laughs are loud, and the heartfelt moments land with real candour. I wanted to create a piece of genre entertainment that had the savvy teen sharpness of Scream, the unsettling atmosphere of The Shining and the strange upstairs, downstairs mythology of Cabin In The Woods.
"At its core, Wrecked is a tense coming-of-age story about a lost, gay kid from Sheffield propelled into uncharted waters of escalating paranoia and self-discovery."
Wrecked is the latest horror comedy set on transport to be commissioned for UK television, following ITV2's Zomboat! and Gold's ongoing Draper's Tours mysteries starring Johnny Vegas and Sian Gibson, returning soon with the three-part series Murder, They Hope.
Brown won the BAFTA Rocliffe award in 2017 for his pilot We Are Your Children, in which a cop strikes an unlikely friendship with a distrusting gay rights activist and an even more distrusting drag queen when they unite to stop a prolific serial killer of gay men in 1970's San Francisco.
He is also currently writing an episode of the Netflix fantasy series Half Bad, produced by Andy Serkis' Imaginarium and based on the books by Sally Green, about the 16-year-old illegitimate son of the world's most feared witch.
Wrecked is being executive produced by Noemi Spanos for Euston Films, which is part of Fremantle, and Tommy Bulfin for the BBC.
Spanos said: "We're thrilled to introduce Ryan's wildly distinctive voice to the BBC Three audience. His blend of comedy, horror and coming of age storytelling has had us laughing, crying and terrified in equal measures throughout the development process and we can't wait to realise Ryan's unique vision and tone on screen."