First, you would have seen a flier, an advertisement for a human force-field experiment or a camera that took pictures of the past. Had you called the number printed at the flier’s bottom, you would have been directed to the 16th floor of a high-rise in San Francisco’s financial district and told to an unlock an office door.So began your “induction process” to the Games of Nonchalance, an art project-cum-social experiment that ran in San Francisco and Oakland from 2008 to 2011 and sent an estimated 7,000 people on a series of avant-garde scavenger hunts. Some participants didn’t know if they had stumbled onto a game or some grand conspiracy. Others feared being lured into a self-help cult.Now, in a wily example of art imitating art imitating life, that immersive experience has been reimagined as “Dispatches From Elsewhere,” a 10-episode scripted series created by Jason Segel, beginning Sunday on AMC.“This one just felt particularly magical in the way that it all came together,” Segel said, speaking by telephone from a park bench in Burbank, Calif.It was also, he added, “super, super hard.”Given the extreme slipperiness of the source material, that checks out. Created by an artist and former data manager named Jeff Hull, the Games of Nonchalance were an alternate-reality game that blurred fact and fiction, leading participants into an elaborate drama in which rival organizations called the Jejune Institute and the Elsewhere Public Works Agency fought for control of esoteric technology.For three years, players followed clues tucked into anonymous phone calls and pirate radio broadcasts, tasked with sabotaging the Jejune Institute and tracking the whereabouts a young woman named Evalyn Lucien — or Eva, as in “Eva Lucien” — who was somehow involved and said to have disappeared in 1988.Some treated Nonchalance as a lark, a goof. Others approached it with fanatical seriousness. Segel discovered it after seeing “The Institute,” a 2013 quasi-documentary by Spencer McCall that was in on the ruse, raising more questions about the phenomenon than it answered.“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I’ve been looking for,’” he said. The CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” had reached its nine-season end, and Segel was in the midst of what he called a “moment of existential crisis.” He no longer knew what kind of artist he was or wanted to be.The Games called out to the kid in Segel who had read portal fantasies and still longed to be told that he had been selected for some great endeavor — the kid who had ignored the rides at Disneyland in favor of roaming around Frontierland in a cowboy costume.“It came to me right at the moment I needed it,” he said.The inception of “Dispatches” mirrored the trickiness of its real-world inspiration. Soon after viewing the film, Segel contacted McCall, who put him in touch with Hull, whose production company had co-produced “The Institute.” Hull, Segel said, hung up on him. I checked this out with Hull. “Yeah, go with that,” he said.Then a cryptic email arrived. Its contents: an address in San Francisco, a date, a time. A week or two later, Segel drove up the California coast and found himself participating in the first chapter of a new project, The Latitude Society, which had him sliding down a hidden passage into an occult library and then back into the street, following clues from one local business to the next.“For that hour, I felt anonymous” he said. “I felt like I was a kid playing pretend.” Later, another email arrived. This one read, “You have divine nonchalance.”Hull had approved the project.The Games of Nonchalance had grown out of Hull’s coursework for a master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts at San Francisco State University. While in school, he had begun to think about how he could use different media — maps, voice mail messages, installation art — to create narrative.“Divine nonchalance” was a feeling he had wanted the game to cultivate in its participants. He described it as “a kind of naïveté, almost like a childlike relationship with the world around you — that freedom from inhibition that sparks creativity and inspiration and allows random beauty to occur.”Hull had designed the game in hopes of creating a psychic shift that made the ordinary world seem more magical. After visiting the “induction center,” a player might have been led to unearth a buried treasure, walk blindfolded through a chapel or dance on a street corner with a man dressed as Big Foot.The lines between where the game ended and reality began sometimes smudged. McCall’s film describes at least one debilitating injury and a lot of unhealthy obsession. Several players seem to experience profound breaks with reality. One player says he broke into a stranger’s home in search of answers. None of that may be true.For a while, Segel envisioned making “Dispatches” a feature film, but he eventually realized that he wanted to write a series; asking audiences to show up at the same time each week felt a little more participatory. While developing the script, he had moved to a farm in a small town an hour or so outside of Los Angeles, which had informed the way he thought about the project — and about everything else.“I think that changed my life,” he said. “I felt like a part of a community. The real thing has been just trying to feel a part of the world around me.”He also decided to focus less on the project’s mythology than on its participants — ordinary people who willingly took a plunge into the unknown. His character is an Everyman with a dead-end job who, like Segel, faces an existential crisis. The other major characters, played by Sally Field, Andre Benjamin and the newcomer Eve Lindley, come equipped with their own interior calamities. Segel wanted to investigate what had led them to the game and how and why each person played it.“A lot of stories are about someone finding out that they’re extraordinary,” he said. “And this whole thing, it’s this idea that we can all be ordinary together and that it’s beautiful.”Based on early episodes, the result is genre-hopping, form-bending and tonally eclectic. Benjamin, who plays a man convinced that Nonchalance is more just than a game, said he hadn’t known the series was based in fact until he was filming Episode 8. He had a go at defining the show.“It’s fantasy, it’s kind of sci-fi, it’s drama, there’s a love story underneath, there’s mystery, there’s tragedy, there’s kind of everything,” he said. “It’s really a trip.”Production incentives prompted a change in setting from the Bay Area to Philadelphia — a good choice, Segel said, because of Philadelphia’s Rocky Balboa grit and its thousands of public murals. As Hull had done with the Games, producers tried to incorporate as much local street art and ephemera into “Dispatches” as they could. The cast and crew were in constant motion.“That by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of work was exciting, was rich, was risky as hell,” said Field, who plays another participant, a woman seeking meaning after her husband falls ill.Other challenges were tonal. “If you go too goofy you lose people, and it feels fraudulent,” said Mark Friedman, the series’s showrunner. “And if it stays too grounded, it’s not fun enough.”Hull, who along with McCall is a co-executive producer, had visited the writers’ room to answer questions and share anecdotes. He wasn’t worried.“I think the show is going to be plenty real and plenty strange,” he said.Segel, Hull and Friedman hinted that the series, like the game, may encourage audience participation. There were cagey mutterings about Easter eggs and other elements that might reward close attention and rewinding, and about a possible real-world component. Pressed for more, Segel was unbudgeable.“I’m sitting here with giant smile on my face,” he said over the phone. “You can’t see because we’re not in person.” Which seemed at least a little mean.But the show’s creators hope also to delight the viewer who doesn’t want to play along, who would never have pulled the flier or danced with Big Foot. (Friedman counts himself among them. “I’m, like, scared to dance at a wedding,” he said.) Television, like life and alternate-reality art projects, can have its own surprises.When I told Benjamin that I had seen the first four episodes and was honestly baffled as to where the series would go, he laughed. “Oh you are in for it,” he said. “I’m telling you, you’re in for it.” More
