The series is based on Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines novel trilogy, with the first novel Pines covered in the first five episodes and the second and third novels, Wayward and The Last Town, making up the remaining five episodes of season one.

M. Night Shyamalan's only condition for joining the project as director and executive producer, after reading the source material, was 'As long as everybody isn't dead, I'm in.'

Since author Blake Crouch was still writing the later novels while the TV series was in development, there was significant 'cross pollination' between the books and the show, causing the adaptation to diverge from the source material in places.

Filming for the series took place between August 19, 2013 and February 14, 2014, with interiors shot in Coquitlam and Burnaby and exteriors in Agassiz, all in British Columbia, Canada.

Showrunner Chad Hodge designed Wayward Pines to be a single 10-episode series faithfully adapting the book trilogy, and the finale was billed as the 'series finale' since the entire story from the source books had been adapted.

Chad Hodge stepped down as showrunner and executive producer after season one, replaced by Mark Friedman, and season two featured a largely new main cast because lead actors like Terrence Howard and Juliette Lewis had committed to other projects between filming and airing of season one.

A digital companion webseries called Gone, written and directed by Christopher Leone, aired on Fox's website alongside the weekly episodes and followed a rocket scientist searching for his missing wife, tying into the mystery of Wayward Pines' construction.

The series debuted simultaneously in more than 126 countries, which Fox billed as 'the world's largest day-and-date launch for a scripted series ever,' with Australia seeing the premiere first due to time zones.