Skip to content

TV on the big screen

This past week saw the release of the much anticipated and heavily promoted Sex and the City 2. As a fan of the TV series and the first movie, I was a little worried about Part Deux. According to the reviews, I had just cause.
This past week saw the release of the much anticipated and heavily promoted Sex and the City 2. As a fan of the TV series and the first movie, I was a little worried about Part Deux.

According to the reviews, I had just cause.

I always worry when producers take a bona fide hit from one genre and move it into another. 
Kiefer Sutherland’s 24 is only temporarily retired, with plans for a big screen version already in the works. 

The series originally began with a somewhat realistic minute-by-minute storyline that lasted a true 24 hours. So it’s been disappointing to see them season after season veer further away from this format. 

Sure, it was still 24 hours of television. But the plot has been filled with approximately six months of activity. And now it has to happen in two popcorn-soaked hours?

And what were the folks at Saturday Night Live thinking when they agreed to put MacGruber in theatres? 

It’s consistently one of the show’s weakest skits and yet they tried to stretch 90 minutes out of it. The MacGruber mullet cannot carry the laughter for that long.

Yes, Star Trek, Batman, Spider-Man, and even Charlie’s Angels (once) made for some pretty good movies. But they were respectful of the original, simply amping it up for the larger screen. 

This is why most TV-to-film productions like Starsky and Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard and even Bewitched fail. They take the series in a totally different direction and forget the original purpose of the show. They lose the motivating factor in the characters and the heart of the story.

Of course, once in a blue moon, a film makes the transition to the small screen to become something far bigger and better. 

While 1992’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a campy flick and minor hit, its TV version was an all-out cult classic. It spawned a spin-off (Angel), an online community of followers and a weird teenage love/obsession with vampires.

Friday Night Lights is a book that became a film that became a much-loved series on NBC – despite poor commercial ratings. 

But it also has a key component. Because the same director worked on both the film and the TV series, stories that were dropped from the book for the film have been explored in detail in its television counterpart. 

See? Television has the capacity to do so much more than film. It takes characters and manipulates, explores and even expands them. 

Why take a multi-faceted character and multi-levelled storyline and force it into a restrictive two-hour plot?

So will 24 fall victim to its film version or become bigger and better? 

Only time – and box office receipts – will tell.






push icon
Be the first to read breaking stories. Enable push notifications on your device. Disable anytime.
No thanks