Thursday, January 17, 2008

T2.1: TV to Movie, Really Groovy...

Just watched the first couple of episodes of the new Fox series--Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Apart from some nice special effects and action sequences, it was borderline incoherent with vapid, shallow, and annoying (albeit attractive) characters. Still, it will probably do well due to the Terminator brand and lack of other content due to the writers' strike. Is it me, or do TV shows that are made into films have a chance at not sucking (Star Trek, Simpsons, South Park, The Fugitive), but movies turned into TV shows generally always stink? With the exception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I can't think of one TV show that was a major improvement on its cinematic origin. Man, at least they won't turn Star Wars into a cheesy TV series. Oh crap.

4 comments:

Digital Downtown said...

What about MASH? I wouldn't call it an improvement on the source material, since the movie rocked so hard, but I'd call it a worthy adaptation. (But you're right. There are like, maybe three of those in existence).

Len said...

I agree on MASH. But that reinforces my point--you have to go back 30 years to find the exception that proves the rule.

upyernoz said...

not quite 30 years, there's still buffy.

so maybe the stars align every 15 years or so.

or maybe it's a lot harder to do a good tv show than a good movie. maybe a serialized that goes on indefinitely, or at least over the course of 13-26 hours is a lot hard to sustain than a story arch that can wrap up in 90-120 minutes.

and it would also make sense that you could take a story that worked well in a long drawn-out series, and condense it into a tighter, more focused 1.5-2 hour movie, but it would be a lot harder to take a movie that worked and then stretch it out into a storyline that is 13 times it original length without resorting to a lot of padding and bad writing.

Len said...

Noz, good point. I read your comment and wonder how anyone has ever produced good TV!

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