It's murder mysterious

"Harper's Island" isn't trying to be all things to all people, but it is trying to be a lot of things.

A horror show. A murder mystery. And, weirdly enough, sort of a scripted reality show.

It's kind of like "Survivor," except that instead of voting somebody off the island every week, somebody on the island is murdered every week.

"This is a weird show, no question about it," said executive producer Jon Turteltaub.

Actually, the show's premise is quite simple. It's a closed-ended, 13-episode series about a group of people who travel to a secluded island for the wedding of Henry Dunn (Christopher Gorham) and the very rich Trish Wellington (Katie Cassidy). And people start getting murdered even before they get to the island.

More will be murdered every week until the finale, when we'll find out whodunit.

"You get all of your answers," Turteltaub said. "You are not going to be stuck for years and years like people are with 'Lost.' And more than that, we are not stuck making (stuff) up as we go along for five years. We know before we start where we are going, and it's really a 13-hour movie."

And they promise we won't feel like they've pulled the answer out of thin air.

"Well, we hope that we've built it in a way when one looks back you go, 'Oh, they didn't cheat,' " executive producer Jeffrey Bell said. "And you don't want to be so smart that everybody is surprised and goes 'What?' "

The producers are trying to tread the line between making the show frightening and making it too graphic. There's a rather horrific murder in the first episode, but it's judiciously edited.

"It is 'Scream' meets 'Ten Little Indians,' " said Bell. "So you've got the Agatha Christie element to it, but we have whaling tools and garden implements and things like that."

"It's certainly not going to be worse than an episode of 'Criminal Minds' or 'CSI,' " Turteltaub said. "I have seen heads roll down the street on 'CSI,' so there is not much of an envelope to push."

As to whether it's going to be good … I'm not sure. The first hour has to spend so much time setting up the premise and introducing the characters that there's not much payoff.

But that may well just be because it is the set-up for the 12 hours that follow.

I'll tune in again next week to find out.

IF YOU LIKE "The Office," you might like "Parks & Recreation." Maybe.

"Parks" is not a spinoff of "Office," but it's from the producers of that show and shares the same format. In this case, the never-seen documentary filmmakers are following Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler of "Saturday Night Live"), a low-level bureaucrat in the city of Pawnee, Ind.