Inside THE INSIDE

Theinsiderachel4There’s a fascinating interview with writer Tim Minear at IFMagazine.com  about the development, production, and demise of the short-lived Fox series THE INSIDE (I’ve talked about the series here before). The  show was cursed from the get-go —  two entire pilots for the series were shot and scrapped before they finally got one that worked (maybe that should have been a hint).

"I got a call from the studio the day we were in prep for the second episode and
they had seen the cut, which by the way I don’t think turned out so well, and
said “I really loved the script, why do I not like this.” So I said “give me a
couple million dollars and I’ll go reshoot it myself” and that’s what we did. We
pushed production, started over again, we recast one of the main characters, and
sort of reworked the sets. We had 12 or 14 days of dress rehearsal and I got to
see all the things that didn’t work and had a very short time to rectify those
things. So we went back and reshot most of the pilot, so there really are two
versions of that pilot, not just the 21 JUMP STREET one, that’s a third version
of a different pilot that exists…

…The problem was, if it had only been the Tim Minear/Howard Gordon version of THE
INSIDE that we had to reshoot large parts of the pilot for, that would have been
one thing. But we had already come in redesigning, reconfiguring and trying to
salvage something else called THE INSIDE that they already spent a year on with
the same actress."

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the television business.

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