Posted on Monday, December 5th, 2011 by Angie Han
We’ve been following Bryan Fuller‘s reimagining of The Munsters for NBC with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation ever since it was first announced over a year ago. On the one hand, another reboot of the beloved ’60s series seems totally unnecessary, and there’s always the fear that the new version won’t do the old one justice. On the other, if someone has to do it, the guy who brought us Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me seems like a pretty good pick. Our hopes crept up just a little bit higher when Bryan Singer boarded the project last week to produce and direct the pilot. Now we have more details on the project, and while it doesn’t sound bad, it doesn’t sound exactly like the Munsters we remember, either. Read on after the jump.
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In 2010 when talk first started to surface about a new version of The Munsters, it was to be a collaboration between Guillermo del Toro and Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies). The show stalled out and when NBC eventually asked Fuller to rework the pilot script into something edgier, Guillermo del Toro was already moving forward with Pacific Rim.
A new name from the roster of geek-friendly film directors has joined the production, however. Bryan Singer will now act as executive producer of the new Munsters, and he’ll direct the pilot, too. Read More »
Posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011 by Angie Han
We’ve got a lot of the usual news bits about casting, renewals, and so on in today’s TV Bits, but first, don’t you want to read about a possible racial slur in a decades-old episode of Fraggle Rock?
After the jump:
- A Texas man reports an offensive slur in a 1984 episode of Fraggle Rock
- Fox’s J.J. Abrams-produced Alcatraz changes showrunners
- NBC picks up Bryan Fuller’s The Munsters pilot
- Comedy Central renews South Park for like the next million* seasons
- Becki Newton heads to CBS’ How I Met Your Mother
- Lone Star actor James Wolk lands on ABC’s Happy Endings
* And by “million,” I mean “five.”
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Briefly: In September French film studio Gaumont announced the LA opening of Gaumont International Television, a company set up to produce TV shows for the North American market. One of two projects mentioned at the launch of the company was Hannibal, a TV series based on the Hannibal Lecter character created by novelist Thomas Harris in the book Red Dragon, and immortalized on film by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. (Brian Cox had played ‘Hannibal Lecktor’ in Manhunter, the original film based on Red Dragon, before Hopkins played the role, but it was Hopkins who turned Lector into a screen icon.)
Hannibal, the TV show (not to be confused with the Ridley Scott movie of the same name from 2001), is written and exec produced by Bryan Fuller. The hour-long drama has now been set up at NBC, and if the network execs like Fuller’s first script the project will skip the pilot stage and go straight to a 13-episode order. We still don’t know much about the story; all that has been said is that the series would “center on Lecter’s early days, namely his time going head-to-head with FBI agent Will Graham.” No casting has been publicly mentioned at this point. [Deadline]
French film studio Gaumont is launching an LA-based TV production arm, Gumont International Television, and in doing so plans to bring an iconic screen killer back to life. Two projects are mentioned in the release informing of the new company. One, written by Michael Hirst, is a six-hour Madame Tussaud mini-series. The other, written by Bryan Fuller (Heroes, Pushing Daisies) will be about the early days of Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer who became one of the world’s most famous film characters thanks to Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in The Silence of the Lambs.
(Brian Cox had previously played the character in Manhunter, and Gaspard Ulliel later played him in Hannibal Rising.)
All the press release offers as far as details is that the show will “center on Lecter’s early days, namely his time going head-to-head with FBI agent Will Graham.” So this is a drawn out cat and mouse procedural? Sounds like that’s the case, with the show taking place between the events of Hannibal Rising and Manhunter. Combining a universally-known character with the perennially popular crime procedural seems like such an obvious move I’m surprised it has taken this long to occur. [via ComingSoon]
Posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 by Angie Han
We’ve got lots of odds and ends for you in today’s TV bits, including renewals, a remake, and a rant by notoriously rant-y Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter. After the jump, read about:
- NBC’s remake of The Munsters
- The new poster for Season 6 of Dexter
- Kurt Sutter’s thoughts on the AMC debacle
- Renewals for USA, TNT, and SyFy shows
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The last time the TV show Wild Wild West was revamped, it resulted in an atrocious Barry Sonnenfeld film that stands as one of the more forgettable big-budget pictures of the ’90s. But the last time Ronald D. Moore revamped a show the result was the new Battlestar Galactica, which was better than anyone would ever have expected. So what will we get out of Mr. Moore’s new take on the classic Western show?
EW says the new Wild Wild West is in very early stages, with at least weeks before networks get a crack at buying it. The original show starred Robert Conrad and Ross Martin as Secret Service agents sent to patrol a territory in the Old West. What will this new one offer? With that setup there’s plenty of room for the mix of character, espionage and political commentary that made Battlestar Galactica so great.
After the break, Terra Nova gets a female lead, and Guillermo del Toro adds another possible project to his plate. Read More »
Briefly: There’s a new Pinocchio film brewing (not the stop-motion one that Guillermo del Toro has talked up) and Bryan Fuller of Pushing Daisies has been hired to write the film for Warner Bros.
Variety doesn’t have too much more detail, but says that the film was inspired by the success of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, so it isn’t a stretch to expect that we’ll see at least a semi-revisionist version of the classic Pinocchio story. (Oh, good.) That story, should you need a refresher, appeared in Carlo Collodi‘s The Adventures of Pinocchio in 1883, and most famously hit screens via Walt Disney in 1940. In the decades since there have been many cinematic incarnations; we’re still trying to forget the Roberto Benigni version from 2002. No word yet on talent attachment beyond Fuller, but we’ll pass details on as they emerge.
