Wondering what Harper's Island is all about? When we speak with the star and creative team behind the upcoming CBS-TV thriller at Wondercon, they explain how it will differ from just about everything else on television…

"I play Trish Wellington," says Katie Cassidy (daughter of former pop idol David Cassidy and – perhaps more significant for genre fans – niece of American Gothic and Invasion creator Shaun Cassidy). "She comes from a rich family. A sweet girl, full of life, she falls in love with Henry at a young age. They go to this island together, and then they go off to college and break up. They come back and realize they're meant to be, and go back to Harper's Island to get married. We think it's gonna be great. But things… sort of go south."

"It's a thirteen-week murder mystery," says producer Jeffrey Bell (pictured center above), a former executive producer on both Angel and Alias, and a writer and story editor on The X-Files. Bell is joined today by his fellow producers Dan Shotz (right) and Karim Zreik (left), both former producers on Jericho, where they worked with Harper's Island co-creator Jon Turteltaub.

"A destination wedding off the coast of Seattle," Bell continues, "a super affluent family who have summered there. Trish Wellington is marrying Henry Dunn. Trish is Katie Cassidy, Henry is Chris Gorham. Chris worked summers, worked on the boat. He's the pauper who married the princess, and they're getting married on Harper's Island. The Island had something terrible happen in the past, about six years ago. John Wakefield, who's sort of our mythology character, came and did a rampage and killed six people. There's twenty-five speaking parts in the pilot, it's very big, and you sort of have to meet all those people. Then bad things start happening, and it's a who and a why. Honestly, anyone can die at any moment. Someone dies in every episode, and by the end of the series, pretty much everyone is dead. No one was hired for the full season, everyone was hired minimally – all we could do to secure them – and then it was week to week after that. Nobody knew when they were gonna die, we didn't tell them until the week they were going to die. It was a very well-behaved cast."   

In the show's pilot episode, there are hints of supernatural forces at play on the island. Dan Shotz explains: "When we started talking about this, we were fans of horror, but we were really fans of the murder mystery. Most people in the business love Twin Peaks. This wasn't intended to be anything like Twin Peaks, but we see there are elements that are similar."

"At the beginning," adds Bell, "you don't know if it's supernatural or not. And we don't do anything we can't buy back. When we were doing it, we knew we couldn't do Friday the 13th. We couldn't just do a body count show, because you get bored. So we tried to find a balance. The show starts a little soft, with a wedding. There are teases of what's to come. But, by five or six episodes in, the tone of the show is completely different, and it's people running through the woods covered in mud and blood and screaming."

Since Harper's Island is airing on CBS, a network famous for attracting an older audience than most, I ask the producers if it's been tricky to show so much blood.

"We knew going in," says Karim Zreik. "We sold a great concept to a show, but we knew that CBS was the buyer, so we had to cater to that network. But I don't think we ever sacrificed the tone of the show by doing that."