Film and Television

Coming Next Fall to a TV Near You

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It's the time of year when networks start ordering pilots for proposed TV series for next year's fall schedule. The Hollywood Reporter has a wrap-up of what's been ordered so far. It looks like this is the first pilot season in years that doesn't include a "re-imagining" of an old TV show. Thank God. But there are plenty of adaptations of movies in the works (About a Boy, Bad Teacher, Beverly Hills Cop, etc.) and quite a few based on books.

Here are some of the more unusual concepts being considered…

The Returned
Logline: What happens when the people you have mourned and buried suddenly appear on your doorstep as if not a day's gone by? The lives of the people of Aurora are forever changed when their deceased loved ones return.
Cast:
Team: W/EP Aaron Zelman (Criminal Minds)
Studio: ABC Studios, Brillstein Entertainment, Plan B

The Ordained
Logline: The son of a Kennedy-esque family leaves the priesthood and becomes a lawyer to prevent his politician sister from being assassinated.
Cast:
Team: W/EP Lisa Takeuchi Cullen; EP Frank Marshall, Larry Shuman, A.B. Fischer; co-EP Robert Zotnowski
Studio: CBS Television Studios

Delirium
Logline: Based on best-selling trilogy about a world where love is deemed illegal and is able to be eradicated with a special procedure. With 95 days to go until her scheduled treatment, Lena Holoway does the unthinkable: she falls in love.
Cast:
Team: W/EP: Karyn Usher (Prison Break, Bones); EP Peter Chernin, Katherine Pope
Studio: 20th Television, Chernin Entertainment

The List
Logline: When members of the Federal Witness Security Program start getting killed, U.S. Marshal Dan Shaker leads the hunt for the person who stole “the list” – a file with the identities of every member of the program.
Cast:
Team: W/EP: Paul Zbyszewski (Lost, Hawaii Five-0, Daybreak); EP Ruben Fleischer (Gangster Squad)
Studio: 20th Television

Girlfriend in a Coma
Logline: After almost two decades, a 34-year-old woman wakes up from a coma to find out she has a 17-year-old daughter from a pregnancy she was unaware of when her life was put on hold.  (Single)
Cast:
Team: EP/W: Liz Brixius (Nurse Jackie); EP Dick Wolf, Danielle Gelber
Studio: Universal Television, Wolf Films
Format: Single-camera

Bloodline
Logline: A contemporary pulp thriller that revolves around an orphaned young girl named Bird Benson, who because of an accident of birth is caught in the struggle between two warring families of mercenaries and killers. Mentored by a Chinese man, Bird has to accept the quest to find and defeat her mother in mortal combat if she is to ever lead a normal life.
Cast:
Team: W/EP David Granziano (Awake, Terra Nova), EP/D Peter Berg, EP Sarah Aubrey
Studio: Universal, Film 44

 

Transporter: The Series

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Transporter-Ex-ElitesoldatFrankMartin-ChrisVance2I saw the first episode of the troubled TRANSPORTER tv series. And it's immediately obvious from the opening scenes why they've blown through two showrunners over just 11 episodes of what ened up being an aborted 22 episode order…and that the studios involved ended up putting their line producer and a director in charge. 

There's lots of European-shot 2nd unit car chases cut into a few scenes of Canadian-shot "drama." But beyond that, it's not a TV series as much as it is a TV adaptation of a co-production contract. Someone along the way forgot there's supposed to be characters and a story in a TV series. There's no creative vision whatsoever to the show, just deal points being honored, ticked off one by one without regard to whether any of it adds up to entertainment.

It doesn't.

 The only thing that's interesting about it, purely from a technical/editing standpoint, is studying how they matched their 2nd unit footage from Europe (which is 60% of the show) with the stuff they shot on streets and stages in Toronto. Sometimes it's very smooth, other times you can really see the rough edges. The actors (namely Chris Vance, stepping in for Jason Statham) clearly spent a lot of time acting with green screens. Watching the show reminded me of how Bill Rabkin and I built episodes of COBRA (syndicated 1993) around Steve Cannell's stock footage library to save money. 

The writing on the series is just atrocious and, since there is no human connection to the action, the stunts/chases lack any visceral impact. You just aren't invested in any of it. The martial arts sequences, though, are  cleverly done and well-staged.

But as Bill and I learned on MARTIAL LAW, that just isn't enough to sustain a series (at least Chris Vance speaks English and doesn't have to work with Arsenio Hall).

Retooling

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Macleans Magazine talked to me about retooling TV shows. I said, in part:

Lee Goldberg, a writer-producer for such heavily retooled shows asDiagnosis Murder (and creator of the novel series The Dead Man) says shows are revised for many reasons: “budget concerns, political issues, previous series commitments, lack of enthusiasm or support at the network.” But, he adds, the primary reason for a retool is summed up in two words: “pure desperation.”

[…]But most of the time, a retool changes a show nobody watches into another show nobody watches. “Perhaps the most startling case of retooling was a series called Klondike,” says Goldberg. “The network thought it was a chilly locale. The show went off the air for two weeks. When it came back it was Acapulco. Didn’t fare any better in a warmer climate.”

I also told the author, columnist Jaime Weinman, that often retooling is a desperate attempt to carry on a hit series after most of the cast has left (like MAYBERRY RFD, THE HOGAN FAMILY, GOLDEN PALACE, and SANFORD ARMS).

For other series, retooling was the norm. THE DORIS DAY SHOW was completely retooled every season for five years…on the drama front, OHARA, the show with Pat Morita as a detective, was retooled every season for three years.

Other examples of radical retooling include BURKE'S LAW, which became AMOS BURKE: SECRET AGENT its last year. THE NEW DICK VAN DYKE show entirely changed its cast and concept in year three. FRINGE has to be the most radical retooling ever (if you don't count the DALLAS season that was written off entirely as a dream).

Another, smaller retooling that usually spells the end of a series is when a series drops their opening theme music in favor of something entirely new to refresh the show — examples include BONANZA, EMERGENCY, KOJAK, SEAQUEST, LOST IN SPACE, CHICAGO HOPE, and 77 SUNSET STRIP. But there are exceptions, too — MONK, SIMON & SIMON, MAGNUM PI, and CHICAGO HOPE are big ones.

But I would say, by and large, that retooling usually fails. 

Evolution of a TV theme

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I've been digitizing a bunch of my old audio cassettes this week and came across a dozen demos by the Canadian group Saga for the theme song to COBRA, the 1993 syndicated TV series starring Michael Dudikoff.  Ultimately, the producers scuttled the song and kept the instrumental.  Here are three of the demos, followed by the final main title sequence.