Hollywood Babble On & On #935: Bad Idea / Good Idea / Bad Idea

BAD IDEA:

Actor and producer Vince Vaughn is in talks to produce a TV series continuation of the cheesy family sitcom The Brady Bunch.

If you've lived in a cave for the last century the original Brady Bunch show was a sitcom about a widower with 3 sons and a widow with 3 daughters, who get married, create TV's first blended family, and wacky hijinks ensue.

Vaughn's production would follow the youngest Brady son, now a middle aged divorced dad, who marries a divorced mother, and wacky hijinks ensue.

Now I've heard that Vaughn's a nice guy, and all that, but I think this is a mistake. There have been half a dozen attempts to extend or revive the franchise ever since the bloom went off the show's rose, from adding Cousin Oliver, to a variety show, to spin-offs, to reunion specials, and they all failed. Then there were the 2 hyper-ironic 90s parody-remake movies that while modestly successful were very quickly forgotten as a 1-joke property that went on too damn long.

While the whole blended family concept was new and novel with the original series, it's been done, it's old hat, and unless you're willing to go into Dan Harmon-esque insanity, pretty much all the material is going to be well retreaded.

What do you think about this idea Victorian Era Gentleman?

Yep, me too.

GOOD IDEA:

Producer Hutch Parker has inked a deal for a TV series adaptation of the Dave Robicheaux novels best-selling mystery author James Lee Burke.

If you're unfamiliar with Dave Robicheaux he's the star detective of a series of 19 novels by Burke set in Louisiana. He's a Vietnam vet, a recovering alcoholic, and former New Orleans police detective who becomes the main detective for the New Iberia Sheriff's department.

He's been adapted for the big screen twice. First with Heaven's Prisoners in 1996 starring Alec Baldwin, and In The Electric Mist in 2009 with Tommy Lee Jones. The first film was a box office failure, and the second movie wasn't even released theatrically in the USA.

That leads me to why I think adapting the books into a TV series is probably the best thing for the author and the books.

Adapting the individual books into feature films means that each novel has to go through years of development, and if they're luck enough to be made, they're only going to be lost in the shuffle as the major studios chase a decreasing number of mega-blockbusters and forget how to make and market the smaller scale, non-spectacle movies.

Television is the perfect medium for a adapting a series of mystery novels. They can begin with book one and have a much freer hand adapting them without having to cram them into a less than 2 hour package. They can do each novel as a one and done TV movie, a multi-part miniseries, or as a series of 1 hour "chapters." Whatever suits the material best is there for them to use.

Also cable TV is much freer subject-matter wise than feature films which fear losing money because of the dreaded "R" rating.

British television has had a lot of success adapting the books and beyond of popular detective novelists in this way. Shows like Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, and Agatha Christie's Poirot, not only do well domestically but sell internationally, enjoying multiple airings in markets all over the world.

So I wish them good luck with this project, and would like to see more like it.

BAD IDEA:

The ABC network has inked a deal with mega-movie producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura to produce a series called Founding Fathers.

The series is about a veteran who returns home to Texas and gets mixed up with the sinister militia movement.

Now that idea would have been cutting edge and daring and relevant if this was 1994.

The militia movement was an offshoot of the survivalism of the 1980s. When fear of nuclear war died down with the fall of the Soviet Union it was replaced with fear of an overreaching and oppressive federal government.

These fears were stoked when raids by federal authorities in Waco Texas, and Ruby Ridge Idaho ended in violence and deaths. For most of the early 1990s the militias were a popular bogeyman in the media, waiting in the woods, getting increasingly radicalized and racially polarized, heavily armed and just itching to overthrow the government on a moment's notice. A lot of the fear mongering was exaggerated, especially since the biggest danger wasn't from any armed group, but from a maniacal lone wolf.

It all came to a head when Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City killing 168 and wounding 800. While his act was not an operation by any known militia group, he was a known militia sympathizer, and claimed that his motive for the attack was to inspire a revolt to overthrow the federal government.

Well, in reality, it turned out that very few people in the militia movement wanted to be associated with a man who blew up a day care center, and the whole movement started to fizzle out. 

True, there are still several dozen "militias" out there, but the days when they were considered a clear and relevant danger to the country are long over.

So why do a show about militias?

I think the motive is more political than commercial. Right now the USA is extremely polarized and Hollywood loves to associate people they don't agree with politically with violent fringe movements.

Personally, I don't think much will come from this project, it will either fizzle out in development, or last about three episodes and get cancelled. Because while they may love sending a message, if it doesn't pay the bills, they might as well just post a blog at the Huffington Post, it's much cheaper.

What do you think Victorian Era Gentleman?

Too true, too true.