TV shows to movies/Movies to tv shows

[Joe Washington]

Which TV shows do you think would have been better off as movies and which movies do you think would have been better off as TV shows?

I think the Harry Potter movie series would have been great as a TV show, giving it plenty of room for material from the books that the movies weren’t able to occupy.

Weeds would have been better off as a dark comedy movie than the endless cycle of mediocre storytelling and messy character development it has become in TV form.

 

[Candlelight]

I can't see how Babylon 5 worked as a tv show. Should've been a single tv movie.

 

[Dream]

I can't see how Babylon 5 worked as a tv show. Should've been a single tv movie.

I can't see how Stargate worked as a tv show. Should've been a single movie.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Star Trek XI would have been better off as a TV show.

Okay, maybe we should take this topic seriously? Harry Potter the TV show would work great on the CW, in fact they're doing it: The Secret Circle. No need to pay anyone royalties for an idea that hasn't been original since forever.

Witches are apparently the hot new thing. ABC has a witch family show in the works:

Wicked Good, which ABC Studios is co-producing with Mandeville, centers on a family of witches, soldiers in an eternal battle between good and evil, which is dispatched to suburban Orange County, where they must root out dark forces while battling the challenges of everyday life in suburbia.

I'd like to see a show that draws from global cultural ideas about witches. Pretty much every culture has its witch legends and some are pretty cool. But I'm sure that would be hard on the budget. Having the witches live in small towns or suburbs is far more manageable.

 

[Harvey]

John Billingsley was on a serialized TV show that was short-lived called The Nine a few years back. It never made sense to me that it would be a TV series, since it revolved around nine characters reacting to a bank heist they were all involved in. Just how long do you ride that premise out?

Firefly worked better on television than it did later as a feature film with Serenity. On the other hand, Alien Nation began life as a feature film, but ended up working better as a weekly television series.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Captain America as a TV series would allow more stories to be told in the WWII milieu. The Avengers movies could be happening in parallel without any difficulty.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Supposedly they're adapting Neil Gaiman's American Gods as a TV series for HBO. I'm not quite sure how that story will work as an ongoing series, especially since

Spoiler: American Gods the book

Mr. Wednesday dies about 2/3rds of the way through the story. I'm just not sure how they would handle that. His death is a major instigation for the remaining plot points, so it would feel like they're treading water if they put if off for too long on the series. On the other hand, kill him off too early and you've gotten rid of your best character.

Dollhouse was a show that, the instant I heard the premise, I thought, "How are they going to sustain this for the long haul?" After 2 seasons, I still don't think the show answered that question to my satisfaction. The stand-alone episodes were far too "Who cares?" while the mythology episodes were a bit too convoluted & unrewarding for my tastes.

I would like to see Harry Potter done as a TV series. Even if they don't want to rehash any of the stuff from the movies, I think a Hogwarts TV series with a new crop of characters could be a lot of fun, a lot like The Clone Wars.

 

[Joy]

Ooo, how about an animated Hogwarts series that follows the next generation (Albus, James, et al)?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

American Gods will need to be revamped to make it stretch into an ongoing series. Ditto for Stephen King's Under the Dome. Which is good news for anyone who's read the books because now you won't be spoiled.

A Harry Potter animated series could work well on The Cartoon Network. It could have all the characters who were in the movies regardless of whether the actors were available for the series. I'm sorta surprised there isn't one yet. But then again, I'm surprised there isn't a Star Trek animated series spinning off Trek XI.

Dollhouse was a show that, the instant I heard the premise, I thought, "How are they going to sustain this for the long haul?"

I don't think the premise was the problem. I think Whedon went awry when he decided to make the lead character too much of a victim. I don't want to identify with a character through pity. That wears off too fast. Maybe it's just me because I'm heartless.

But seriously, I don't see a lot of shows around that use pity as the emotion that bonds the audience and the lead character. The closest are shows about a damaged person, like Dexter or (less extreme) Justified, but the pity is hugely mitigated by also making the character very dangerous and able to take care of himself. So in those cases, a slight tinge of pity is mixed in with a heavy dollop of fascination for a character who is enacting a power fantasy of getting away with shit that we all kind of wish we could.

So a better approach for Dollhouse would be to make the lead character legitimately guilty of something, not a victim, but a person who was perhaps shockingly evil in their former life, and who decided to be brainwashed into dollhood in order to kill that terrible person that they were.

Then the tension can be, as the person becomes more aware of who they were, that other person might re-emerge. Do they want that? Is being brainwashed better? That dramatic tension could have held my interest through any number of mission-of-the-week stories.

If Whedon can't resist making female characters too victim-y, and I suspect that's something he would have a problem with, he should have made the lead character a male, and make the show more like the power fantasy I described above. A doll can get away with behavior that would be condemned in a "conscious" person. It's a get out of jail free card. The audience will be both attracted and repulsed by the character's actions, which will create the same kind of fascination that has made Dexter and Justified hit shows.