Field Of Dreams TV Series Bulldozed At Peacock, Seeking New Home Elsewhere
If you build it, they will come ... and then leave before the game has started. That seems to be what has happened, at least, with Peacock's "Field of Dreams" TV series.
Last summer, just days after a real Major League Baseball game between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox took place at the Iowa shooting location for "Field of Dreams," Peacock gave a show based on the Oscar-nominated film a straight-to-series order. It felt like "Field of Dreams" nostalgia was at an all-time high that week, as MLB players came walking out of a cornfield onto the baseball field to shake hands with Kevin Costner, who starred in the 1989 sports fantasy as a farmer who hears a whispery voice inspiring him to create "something totally illogical" — a baseball field in his cornfield.
Then, came the news of this "Field of Dreams" series, which was set to be steered by writer and executive producer Michael Schur, creator of "The Good Place" and co-creator of its fellow NBC sitcoms "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and "Parks and Recreation." According to Variety, however, Peacock has now decided to pass on "Field of Dreams," leaving Universal Television, the production company behind it, to try and find a home for it elsewhere, while the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Chicago Black Sox disperse.
Though Schur has history with NBC and is reportedly under a nine-figure development deal with Universal Television, his would-be adaptation has gone the way of J.J. Abrams' recently abandoned "Demimonde" series over at HBO.
Build it elsewhere?
On the one hand, I'm not sure how high demand really was for yet another TV series adapting (and indeed, milking the life out of) a beloved old film like "Field of Dreams." On the other hand, it's Hollywood, where everything old is new again, and NBC had success with this approach already in the 2000s when it turned another sports film, "Friday Night Lights," into a highly acclaimed series.
The original "Field of Dreams," which co-starred James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan, and the late Ray Liotta, also traded in nostalgia. If you go back and watch the trailer for it, there's a kind of dewy-eyed earnestness to it that — if it were going to be in the vein of Schur's previous sitcom work — might get updated to something a little more self-aware in a modern adaptation of the same book ("Shoeless Joe" by W.P. Kinsella).
That said, at a time when the miasma hanging over American culture seems to thicken every day, a show where someone's inner dreamer awakens to do something constructive and magical in the world could have been inspiring in a "Ted Lasso" kind of way. Or maybe we're too jaded for that now.
Whatever the case, the "Field of Dreams" TV series has Lawrence Gordon, who co-produced the original film, behind it, and it's still possible that another distributor could give it life. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened for Michael Schur, as the aforementioned "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" is a series that NBC famously rescued and renewed for another three seasons after Fox canceled it.