This is the second-biggest thing ever in the history of the reality universe after SURVIVOR.

Finally, a reality show that delivers on real thrills—the cinematic ones.
Amazon’s new show, THE THRILLER PROJECT, is a stunning package of inventiveness and bravery.

Each episode gives directors and their writing and stunt teams a single elaborate set—that they then have to use by coming up with an action-suspense sequence that fits it within three days.

EACH EPISODE GIVES DIRECTORS AND THEIR WRITING AND STUNT TEAMS A SINGLE ELABORATE SET–THAT THEY THEN HAVE TO USE, BY COMING UP WITH AN ACTION-SUSPENSE SEQUENCE THAT FITS IT WITHIN 3 DAYS….

While the quality varies, the showcase for creativity never fails to be
extremely interesting.

Past episodes have included wonderfully-outfitted Hollywood sets
begging for a great story sequence to incorporate: an air hangar filled
with planes, a complicated and multi-layered antique store, a
hyperloop tunnel testing lab, a gorilla habitat in a zoo, a meat packing
plant, a classic car shop, a a scifi starship set, and each one is more
unusual than the last.

In the opening “tour” section, seeing how these professionals
collaborate to create intense and amazing moments of distilled cinema
is a privilege.

At times, the sponsorship—of Ikea for one furniture-store setup, of
Audi for a car-manufacturing plant—does get a bit heavyhanded, but it
also seems well integrated into the basic idea.

I think people have made too much of the problem with the episode
with the Russian military. I know it wasn’t particularly fair to use the
people of the Crimea as unwilling stunt doubles, but the Russian
government put its own restrictions and conditions on the filmmakers,
so to use a giant battlefield set with all of the Russian equipment on
display, you have to make some concessions. Zack Snyder’s use of all
the elements was masterful. Personally, I think Amazon could use the
tragic situation as a publicity boon: why not advertise as the first reality
show to cause a thousand actual casualties?

What reason could there be that this is not the most talked-about show on television right now?

It could be that the show’s move, from Netflix to Hulu and then to Amazon, confused viewers. But it’s not fair. This thing is literally a thrill machine, engaging not only the audience but the creators themselves with intricate and clever twists.

The challenge is so simple and great: assemble gifted directors from many genres to do their own intense, thirty-minute-long suspense sequence based around a great set, and perhaps-familiar tropes from thriller movies, but reworked into something altogether new…

Each story begins with an arresting, unbelievable visual grabber—an action-suspense sequence that seems like it could not possibly make sense, and then, it works its way backward and forward to reveal how we got here.

For example, in one brilliant fearsome sequence, a huge group of cops rush to a building to stop what seems like a killer assailant inside–but then instead, begin to ruthlessly pursue the teenaged girl victim!

She evades them throughout the building’s rooms, alley, and street in what would be a harrowing FRIDAY THE 13^th sequence except the attackers are cops who seem to want to quietly get rid of her, as if she is the real threat…

The nearly wordless opening moments are the stuff of great moviemaking, and after she eludes them, they are later revealed in flashbacks to be dirty cops getting rid of a partner’s daughter who stole their money when she found out they were on the “take.”

In another amazing opener, a diesel truck smashes through a roadside diner seemingly for no reason, trying to pick off the people in the restaurant, later revealed to be a revenge story by a very-justified truckdriver.

My favorite is a disturbing, long-unreeling sequence involving a doctor going into a hospital, taking out an M-16, and shooting the patients in the ER. It’s as shocking and attention-getting as the opening scene of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, but later, the hospital is revealed to be a military MASH style medical camp, and the patients are corrupt and evil soldiers involved in murdering comrades and innocents in a Syrian village nearby…

Consistently trippy and unpredictable, THE THRILLER PROJECT is a great director’s showpiece arena.

Here’s a rundown of the first season’s stories for those who missed it:

-Opening sequence: men rushing into an apartment at night, all to apprehend a single woman whose calls for help not only go unheeded, but attract new killers from neighboring apartments…! The story is revealed to be the tale of a woman caught watching neighbors through her back window, but is herself trapped in the sights of another peeping tom stalker who decides to teach her a lesson. He arranges for all the very-disturbed neighbors to attack her together on the same night. What seems like a surreal, unlikely turn of events becomes logical. It turns out the apartment across the way from her is bankrolled by a mafia outfit who keep contract killers and crazies and on-the-run mafiosos in a safe environment. She has simply chosen the wrong people to “people watch.”

-Opening sequence: a series of shots tear through a bus in slow-motion, heart-stoppingly frightening as each bullet misses killing the passengers by a hair’s breadth. The plot rolls out a group of people trapped on a tour bus by a sniper who forces them to stay put as he talks to them, trying to narrow down which one of them is in the witness protection program and is his target… When he realizes the police have found him and are coming in, he decides to use his last seconds to show them his precise skills and exactly how close they all came to death…

-Opening sequence: a group of hunters in a vicious, slow-motion epic fistfight involving a bevy of dead elk, a living bear, a collapsing cabin, and a corpse that someone always ends up slammed into, all shown in a complex Rube Goldberg machine type of tableaux… It seems a group of wealthy businessmen share the occasional use of a cabin in the woods for hunting; when someone in the group uses the opportunity to hunt an actual human being, the others find it hard to figure out which one of them did it, at a tricky retreat where everyone is gathered…

-A group of people fall from skyscraper ledges at nearly the same time, at buildings close together, on one gray, creepy day in New York City as birds swoop past us wildly. Naturally, we wonder how the hell does this happen? The backstory is, people afraid of heights are forced by a treatment facility to confront their fears by standing on skyscraper terrace ledges… but one man’s perch is shared by a particularly nasty group of hawks. Vertigo Birds.

-A man pulls a wooden board from a complex barricade, sending a series of obstacles tumbling down onto a bulldog, including a carefully-placed butcher knife…! How did we get here? An agoraphobic experiences San Francisco’s worst earthquake in over a century, and ends up trapped with three bulldogs that grow ever-hungrier day by day, that’s how…

-Airline attendants quietly assemble a bizarre-looking hodge-podge of metal things into a battering ram they use to smash in a cockpit door as wild laughter and heavy noise fills the speakers. The flashback is just as intense: Passengers on an airplane are told by a psychotic captain that he plans to crash the plane unless someone can get through his iron door barrier. They have 30 minutes, during which he plays psychological games with them over the intercom.

-Men and women are on the floor, with just their eyes moving, desperate but holding still, as a nurse drags one man over to a window, and throws him out of the highrise. When his body gets snagged on the flagpole, she goes out to kick him off. Why is all this happening? The lead-up is this: Paralyzed patients in a hospital ward are confronted by an insane nurse who wants to know which one of them stole her expensive necklace… none of them seem to know what she’s talking about…until suddenly two of them admit the crime separately, to get her to loosen up on a threat to kill them all. The thing is, both have a reasonable story…

-Two men strangle a large woman as she kicks free and almost makes it to a boat, all on the top of a flooded house in a storm in New Orleans. The tale? Ex-cons escaping during a Louisiana hurricane wind up in the flooded home of a fearsome old woman rumored to toy with voodoo, whose apparent manipulation of something on the bottom floor, swimming in the water, becomes highly threatening…

-A diesel truck smashes through a diner, as the driver tries to run down the people in the restaurant. What could they have possibly done to deserve this? Well, two truckdrivers in the diner get into a heated argument in the flashback section, as a wayward long-haul driver who witnesses it has trouble understanding their intense hatred… He soon sees why it’s dangerous that he fails to choose a side and drives off… He senses the entire stable of truckdrivers in the diner hate his guts in some kind of strange brotherhood he has violated, a situation which escalates into a threat both in and out of the diner—as he is later targeted in collisions by other big rigs while driving his cross country… He winds up in a hospital. Much later, he exacts revenge by going back to the diner and getting them all at once with his diesel destructor… a wild, dreamlike road rage episode.

-In this one, a huge living shark at the end of a giant hook thrashes madly as a large group of people try to kill it on a dock. Eventually there is success, but the ensuing days prove interesting. The premise is, a man who kills a great white shark menacing a seafront tourist town is later harassed by a deranged animal activist who eventually attacks the sailor at his waterside home, forcing him to try to escape in a boat, which is then chased until the psycho hops aboard, captures the man, and prepares to feed him to the sharks he once hunted…

-A strange, lonely driver picks up a likeable hitchhiker, and then later, another one. When someone in the car steals the driver’s lunch and eats it, the driver becomes upset trying to figure out who did it…and a strange and scary streak is revealed by the other hitchhiker, who seems to want to make a deal with the driver to punish the protagonist—by dragging him behind the car. Turns out, our hero is a former stuntman, and they have chosen the wrong guy to hurt. The opening sequence of a man being dragged behind a pickup truck, who gets out of it, gets on top of the truck and attacks the two people inside has to be seen to be believed.

-A spurned woman has survived attacking a philandering husband she had an affair with, but years later, her wealthy illegitimate daughter pays a shadowy group to kidnap him and give him a forcible operation to make him into a woman…! The opening of a man running through a dark lab—with everyone else seeing a woman running instead—is confusing in the best possible way until we satisfyingly find out the reason.

-A subway train crashes, but while dealing with the trauma of this, it is revealed that homeless mole people are rushing in to steal from the victims—which sets off a dangerous battle with an ex-cop who refuses to cooperate… The bent-up subway train wreckage is just registering in our minds when we see the shaven-headed, freaky subterranean invader-men push into the mess and begin their robbery when the stunning show opens.

-Three bicycle messengers in Rio discover they’ve been given small crates of volatile nitroglycerin by a playful drug lord, and if they can get them through town to a remote area across a rope bridge without anything blowing up, he’ll set them up for life financially… Impoverished, they choose to try. The opening sequence of one man trying to keep his bike going as he’s accidentally set on fire by a fire-juggler is only the beginning…! Heartstopping.

-A teenage girl has had an affair with her father’s business partner who comes to dinner to taunt her about revealing it, but she is far from empty-handed. She has uncovered information that the man’s father was a sadistic drug lord accountant and the family wealth was stolen and will be taken back violently if it’s ever revealed. The two play a cat and mouse game until the man decides to off them all…discovering the twisted teenage girl is more tenacious than thought. Seeing her running up to the cops and firemen after her house has been set aflame in a giant long-take opener changes our view of the damsel in distress by the end of it all…

-In a WWII episode, two Nazi colonels play a deadly game of gladiator combat using American and British POWs fighting to the death, but when an unexploded bomb interrupts them by bursting through the prison camp ceiling, the tables are turned, and interesting negotiations begin. The Brits and Americans have the bomb de-fusing know-how. The beginning and the ending explosion is a tour de force of effects and suspenseful choreography.

-A wealthy man’s twin sons are kidnapped but he refuses to pay the ransom, opting instead to give his sons a cryptic message, soon revealed to be a kill order–as the boys have supernatural powers and are incredibly dangerous… while at first one boy appears to have a change of heart to help the kidnappers escape the deadly revenge, it turns out the two twins are just playing with the men, and they could keep doing it for a very long time. Where at first we saw these boys abducted from a limousine, we now know it is the abductors who are in real trouble.

-A symphony orchestra whips out weapons and fires at its audience, murdering people gleefully. How did we get here? Well, it seems a Russian Lieutenant General in the Stalin years has told a symphony orchestra at gunpoint they must play the music of a composer they despise (because he was a murderous general who killed their comrades in gulag), but their method of rebellion is brilliant…as they slowly assemble several weapons hidden within the orchestra itself. (Eventually, they take out the guards and their invited laggies with gunfire, and feed the general a poison to knock him out and cause him later that night to die by bleeding from the ears in poetic justice, as they slip away to a previously-set-up airplane escape–to defection!)

Overall, it’s a throwback to classic thriller days and old-fashioned exaggerated Hollywood storytelling, but it’s done with all the new bells and whistles—and all the nasty chutzpah the modern cinema has to offer.