Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor is in the midst of
turning his lyrics and music into an epic science fiction series on HBO. Based on his [2007] Album Year Zero.
Hero Complex reports the NIN album Year
Zero, a musical chronicle that criticizes
contemporary policies of the United States government by presenting a dystopian
vision of the year 2022, is being adapted as a TV series. If you think it’s
going to be difficult to adapt an album into an entire TV series, leading up to
the album’s release an alternate reality game brought fans into
the story and crafted an entire world that the the music of Nine Inch Nails
would come to represent.
Producer Lawrence Bender, who has worked with Quentin
Tarantino on films such as Pulp Fiction and Inglourious
Basterds as well as producing documentaries like An Inconvenient
Truth, and Roswell executive producer Kevin Kelly Brown
are behind the project. Reznor also reveals:
“Our writer is Daniel Knauf
from Carnivàle and he’s busy with pages right now and revising
the overall world Bible. It’s been an interesting collaborative effort but I’ve
learned that [television development] moves at a glacial pace.”
Courtesy of
Wikipedia, below we’ve included a plot description of the events that took
place within both the ARG and the album:
The story takes place in the United States in the year
2022, which has been termed “Year 0″, by the
American government, being the year that America was reborn. The U.S. had
suffered several major terrorist attacks, apparently by Islamic
fundamentalists, including attacks on Los Angeles and Seattle. In response, the
government granted itself emergency powers and seized absolute control on the
country. The U.S. government is now a Christian fundamentalist theocracy,
maintaining control of the populace through institutions like the Bureau of
Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano. Americans must get licenses
to marry, bear children, etc. Subversive activities can result in these
licenses being revoked. Dissenters regularly disappear from their homes in the
night, and are detained in federal detainment centers and sanitariums, if not
executed.
The government corporation Cedocore distributes the drug
Parepin through the water supply, making Americans who drink the water
apathetic and carefree. There are several underground rebel groups, mainly
operating online, most notably Art is Resistance and Solutions Backwards
Initiative. The First Evangelical Church of Plano is a fundamentalist Protestant
Christian church which is favored by the neo-conservative government.
Amidst all of this are increasing sightings of what is
labelled “The Presence”, which manifests as a pair of massive ghostly hands and
arms extending down from the sky into the ground. Despite early attributions of
The Presence to drug-induced mass hysteria, it soon becomes clear that it is a
physical phenomenon capable of being recorded on video and film. Theories vary
on the real cause of the appearances, but the prevailing opinion appears to be
that the hands represent God or some other equivalent supernatural force. On
February 10, 2022, a government official named Doug reports that sightings of
the phenomenon are rapidly being reported from all over the world. The sequence
ends with a broken message announcing the appearance of The Presence over the
United States Capitol Building. The message cuts off suddenly, implying the end
of the world.
Working to prevent this are the Solutions Backwards
Initiative, which is a group of students, professors, and computer experts who
devise a successful means with which to send information back through time
using quantum mechanics in order to prevent the dystopian future (and eventual
apocalypse) they live in from ever occurring. The websites and music of the
Year Zero alternate reality game are implied to be part of the information
packets sent back through the wormholes.
