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INVASION WILL RETURN ON APRIL 19 FOR A 5-EPISODE RUN, CULMINATING WITH THE SEASON FINALE ON MAY 17.
Series creator Shaun Cassidy knows a bit about Homestead, since his wife's family still lives there, so you might expect
a certain level of authenticity. What you might not expect is a convincing slice of the South Florida Everglades smack in
the middle of the Warner Bros. back lot in Burbank, Calif., just a short golf-cart ride from Cassidy's production offices.
The show also films on location in Fillmore, Calif., and other surrounding areas. "This is our pond," Cassidy says, standing next to a good-sized, murky body of water surrounded by trees and bordered by
a large blue-screen canopy. "This is our window to the Everglades. It's about four feet deep. The blue screen comes and goes,
depending on what we're doing. "This pond was here. We added all the saw grass, and we dressed it with a lot of specific foliage to Florida. But I think
it was used in 'Fantasy Island.' They shot a lot of 'Adaptation' here and 'The Last Samurai.'" The dirt road that runs by the pond is rutted and muddy -- the result of cinematic "rain" the night before -- and Cassidy
says that some of the huge trees alongside it long predate "Invasion." "This is a banyan tree," he says. "This was here. We didn't put this big tree in. That's a magnolia, and that's a parking
lot. Can you see it through there, through the painted screen?" Pointing at another painted backdrop, he says, "It's shielding a fence leading out to Warner Bros. Records, where I made
records when I was a kid. Right there. That's where I used to go all the time. It's really weird." The eldest son of Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones, and half brother to David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy had a recording career
as a teenager, including the hit 1977 single "Da Do Ron Ron," and later segued into acting and then writing and producing.
By the '90s, he was creating such TV shows as "American Gothic" and "Roar." Because of his parentage, Cassidy has a lifelong history in show business. "My first memory of being on any lot was this lot," he says, "when my mother was doing 'The Music Man.' I was, like, 5
years old, and I was riding my bike around with Ronny Howard, who was 8 or 9 years old." Adjacent to the pond is the field office of park ranger Russell Varon (Eddie Cibrian). Not far away, nestled amid more
trees and greenery, is the rustic, storm-battered house Russell shares with his children -- teenage Jesse (Evan Peters) and
little Rose (Ariel Gade) -- and his pregnant second wife, TV reporter Larkin Groves (Lisa Sheridan). Russell's first wife, Dr. Mariel Underlay (Kari Matchett), lives with her second husband, Sheriff Tom Underlay (William
Fichtner), and his teenage daughter, Kira (Alexis Dziena), in an expensive subdivision that suffered no hurricane damage --
but that's later in the tour. On the way to Russell's house, chain saws drown out conversation as a large tree is cut into pieces, and Cassidy has to
hop out of the golf cart to move aside branches. "By the way," he says, "what they're doing here -- we constantly have to make hurricane debris." A later encounter with producer Timothy Marx, who's walking a new director around the set, reveals the tree in question
was actually 15 years old and rotted out and fell of its own accord. Next to the house is a barn occupied by Russell's brother-in-law, conspiracy theorist Dave Groves (Tyler Labine), who rightly
suspects that all is not well with the Underlays. "It's an indoor-outdoor set," Cassidy says. "You never see, on television, people playing a scene inside and walking outside
in one shot. You usually have to cut, because it's usually on a soundstage. "The benefit is, we're playing the nature and bringing it in, but the downside is real weather is going to affect us and
real sound. When it's raining on the roof, you hear it." The house itself is roughly thrown together -- Cassidy explains that Russell built it from a dilapidated shell for Mariel
when she was pregnant with Rose -- and much the worse for wear after the hurricane. There are replacement shingles on the
roof, missing windows and a lot of dirt tracked everywhere. But still it has charm. "Our guys did this in three weeks," he says. "There was nothing here. You're seeing it more cleaned up than it was. This
has been a slow recovery. This is an old house, and Russell added onto it. "What's so great, you can shoot through windows to real outdoors. You can walk and talk, go into the bedroom, through the
living room, out into the yard, over to Dave's barn, get into a car and leave, all in one shot." There's also a treehouse Russell built for Rose, from which one could see, as Cassidy says, "probably Burbank." In sharp contrast is the Underlay McMansion, built on a soundstage that Cassidy says once was home to "Casablanca," "A
Streetcar Named Desire" and "East of Eden." It's an angular, cold house painted in dull colors. "This was the model for the neighborhood," Cassidy says, "and Underlay
said, 'I'll take it,' and surprised Mariel with all the furniture." As to the possibility of another storm before the end of the season, Cassidy says, "There may be, but in our
universe, it's not so much about the hurricane as what comes in with the hurricane."
Feature Former teen idol has high hopes for the spooky Invasion By Jim Benson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/24/2005 While many TV viewers have been tracking hurricanes this season, Shaun Cassidy has been eyeing one particular
storm. After a somewhat rocky ratings start for ABC's Invasion, about the sinister aftereffects of a devastating
Florida hurricane, the network last week finally provided Cassidy's new show—its entry in the supernatural-series sweepstakes
this season—with a full season order. But the 47-year-old former Hardy Boys teen idol, now a showrunner and writer, was encouraged even prior
to the announcement. ABC had continually expressed its happiness to Cassidy about the creative direction of Invasion,
showing its trust in him by providing only minimal weekly script notes for the character-based serial mystery. Peter Roth, president of Warner Bros. Television, where Cassidy has established his production company, attributes
getting Invasion's plum 10 p.m. Wednesday post-Lost time slot to a variety of factors, including its compatibility
with the 9 p.m. juggernaut. Yet the program's positioning on ABC's prime time schedule has proved to be both a blessing and a curse for
the network, studio and Cassidy. Invasion has been improving on its time-period average versus last year and winning
in adults 18-49, but the concern stems from the fact that the show has been losing more than half the frighteningly huge audience
delivered by the sophomore giant preceding it. The rookie series, whose ratings have stabilized over the past two weeks, also
has to face off each week against tough competition: Jerry Bruckheimer's CSI: New York on CBS and Dick Wolf's Law
& Order on NBC. Cassidy has been through this exercise before with a number of short-lived but critically acclaimed series,
including American Gothic, which lasted one season on CBS a decade ago, and 2000's Cover Me, which aired on
USA. Cassidy's longest-running series is CBS' CIA thriller The Agency, which he executive-produced during
its two-season run. He was forced to quickly retool the series when it debuted shortly after 9/11. The events of that day
made Cassidy want to bring the darkness out of the shadows in his next series: “For my money, there are all sorts of
scary things happening in broad daylight.” That led to Invasion, which almost provided Cassidy with a repeat of his 9/11 experience on The
Agency. Debuting shortly after the Gulf Coast was ravaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, production was already well
under way on the show, and it was too late to alter scenes. Invasion is set in Homestead, Fla., where Cassidy's wife, Tracey, lived through Hurricane Andrew in
1992; she witnessed firsthand the dramatic changes the storm brought to the community. Cassidy thought it would be interesting
to set a mystery show in a small town on the heels of a disaster. “Our timing has been rather strange in that it was a big hurricane season last year and this year has
been one like we haven't seen in our lifetime,” he says. Cassidy did not want the hurricane in the show to “feel like an exploitive event, so we went back and
looked at what we originally shot just to make sure it was being given the gravitas that it deserved in light of recent events.
And it did, actually, so nothing has really been altered. The show really isn't about a hurricane; it is about community.” His shows have earned Cassidy the respect of networks and studios, which keep coming back for more. Warner
Bros. has brought in Cassidy, who also co-created the series Roar and Players, as executive producer to launch
several series, including CBS' Cold Case. Warner Bros.' Roth first met Cassidy in 1997, when the former oversaw programming
for Fox. Roth was impressed by Cassidy, even though Roar, a highly anticipated action-adventure show for Fox set in
fifth-century Ireland and starring then-newcomer Heath Ledger, tanked in less than two months. “He is a uniquely talented, very passionate, outstanding writer and producer,” says Roth, who
rushed to sign Cassidy two years ago when Cassidy left his longtime home at Universal after all his mentors had departed.
Major themes for Cassidy, the son of actors Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones and half-brother of David Cassidy,
are family relationships and the paradox of optimism in the face of calamity. Family themes were evident again last year in CBS' short-lived The Mountain. Cassidy wrote for and
executive-produced the program about a namesake who reluctantly inherits a ski resort, then has to contend with a bitter older
brother who is already working there. “People talk about my shows having a dark streak,” Cassidy says. “But I'm really interested
in family and all of the machinations of family.” Still, it is hard to overlook that “dark underbelly,” as Cassidy calls it, running through his
shows. Gothic, the 1995-96 series, was about a demonic, twisted sheriff in an idyllic little town. The disturbed lawman's
affable personality belied his insatiable and murderous appetite for control. Cassidy credits his dysfunctional upbringing in New York and Beverly Hills as the inspiration for Gothic,
which he describes as another of his “family” shows—a moniker perhaps more in tune with the Mansons than
The Waltons. To explain his penchant for mixing complex, layered plots with compelling and evil characters, Cassidy quips,
“I'm Irish. I have no choice.” He has a sense of humor: The first pilot he wrote after making the jump from acting and singing in the early
1990s was a comedy for Fox called Fear of Family. He always preferred to spend his time between takes with the writers while working on ABC's The Hardy Boys
from 1977 to '79. During his first year on the show, he released the single “Da Do Ron Ron.” Cassidy jokes that he made the transition from pop star to producer because “I made a deal with my audience.
They agreed to stop buying my records, and ...” he shrugs.
Shaun Cassidy, creator and executive producer of ABC's new SF series Invasion —which kicks off with a hurricane in a unique perspective on living through a hurricane, thanks to someone close to him. "There have been numerous disasters of late,
and yet a lot of us are still here, and we don't know what the ramifications
really are yet," Cassidy (American Gothic) said in an interview. "That's
the universe our show is set in. ... And it's also personal for me. My wife is
from went through Hurricane Andrew," the real-life 1992
storm that helped inspire Invasion, well before Hurricane Katrina devastated Surrounding areas.
Cassidy said that his wife was a senior in high school at the time and
had to live for months without electricity. He said her perception of what happens to a community when a hurricane hits has helped color his approach to Invasion.
Cassidy's description of the series sounds eerily similar to the real-life drama that is playing out on CNN in the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina. Invasion is "a show about a family and community
in recovery, post-hurricane, and a lot of people are traumatized by the initial event," Cassidy said. "It's really the aftermath that is the breeding ground
for ongoing mysteries. Aberrant behavior in the population, changes in the population
that initially are attributed to the trauma as a result of the hurricane."
According to Cassidy, the show's hurricane will lead to the quarantine of the small hospital, and there are bodies missing. They don't
know what the state of the water is. It serves to isolate a lot of these people,
and there may be darker forces at work here. The sheriff seems to have another
agenda beyond just protecting this community. He may want his community
and the people to survive, but he may want certain things to survive more than
others."
Cassidy said that he plans to keep his "suspense thriller" series as grounded in science
fact as possible. "If at the end of the season it doesn't come off as science
fiction at all, that would be fantastic," he said. Shaun Cassidy likes a little mystery in his life. He was a Hardy Boy,
after all. Plus, there was that baffling business with the "Da Doo Ron Ron." More recently, in his second life as a TV producer,
Cassidy created the creepy 1995 soap American Gothic and ran CBS’ 2001 CIA spook show The Agency–both
short-lived. Now there’s ABC’s Invasion, an enigmatic serial starring Eddie Cibrian (Third Watch)
and William Fichtner (The Longest Yard) about a Florida town recovering from a hurricane that brought with it a big
wave of weirdness (and some glowing orange orbs, to boot). Alien incursion? Mass demonic possession? Old folks gone loco?
Whatever it is, the timing of Cassidy’s idea could not have been more perfect. "I had the fortuitous luck of pitching
this show the day after Lost premiered," says Cassidy. "The gods were smiling on
me that day." There are bits of mystery and sci-fi, but there’s a very strong family dynamic." That’s not a coincidence. "I’m interested in complicated families. I come
from one," says Cassidy, 46, son of The Partridge Family’s Shirley Jones, half brother to David Cassidy, and
thrice-married father of four. Invasion, he continues, is what you get when your new wife from Homestead, Fla., tells
you stories about surviving Hurricane Andrew–which then mingle with your notions of making a Rosemary’s Baby-type
thriller. "Invasion is an allegory," says Cassidy. "This little town is a microcosm for how you deal with your life–and
with the unknown–post-disaster." Invasion may have many
meanings for Cassidy, but he agrees that most people are going to assume that it’s all about little green men. The pilot
doesn’t discourage this thinking: Russell’s brother-in-law (Tyler Labine) is an ET-believing conspiracy theorist,
while characters go missing and come back...changed. Still, Cassidy says that as the conflict between Underlay and Russell
escalates from personal to ideological to perhaps political, the little-green-men question will become more gray. Or
it may not. "I ran a show about the CIA," says Cassidy. "I cannot confirm or deny anything." –Jeff Jensen QUOTES FROM SEPT 15 ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (REGARDING INVASION'S RELAVENCE TO
THE REAL-LIFE DISASTER) "The catalyst in our show is a hurricane, but the aftermath is totally different than Katrina.
Our little TV show is inconsequential in the big picture of human suffering."
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