In the US: Wednesdays, 8.30/7:30c, Fox In the UK: Not yet acquired
The trouble with not being a genius – at least if you’re a writer writing about genius – is by definition, you’re not smart enough to work out what it must be like. Sherlock Holmes can imagine himself into the minds of lesser people; lesser people cannot imagine the thoughts of Sherlock Holmes.
Hence Elementary.
Interestingly, what seems to happen as a result is that the lesser people – let’s call them writers – imagine there must be a fundamental problem with the genius that renders them in some way lesser to the writers. The writers become the geniuses, as do their audiences.
This common failure of imagination usually manifests itself in the idea of inferior social understanding. Gosh, smart people must be really bad with other people who aren’t as smart as them, hey? Men, women, boys, girls – they may know one end of a microscope from another but can they tell when someone’s upset with them? No, of course not. Not like us regular, writer types.
Witness Numb3rs and Scorpion, for example. And now Outmatched.
In the US: Mondays, 8/7c, Fox In the UK: Not yet acquired
Spin-offs are a funny old game. You can either do more of the same, just in a different location, or you can do something completely different. The former risks being boring, cannibalising your own ratings and ultimately not attracting anyone new to the show; the latter risks ostracising your existing viewers while not recruiting anyone new.
In the world of procedural TV, the limits are even more restrictive. A cop show is a cop show is a cop show, no matter where you go, so you have to find room to manoeuvre elsewhere.
So kudos to 9-1-1: Lone Star for being brave and different – and making a clean break of it. Sure, just like 9-1-1, it’s still all about the emergency services, focusing on paramedics and firefighters, but as the name suggests it’s set in Texas, and it has no characters in common with the original show. It also has a more famous cast.
More importantly, unlike its predecessor, it’s at least half comedy, that comedy being Parks & Recreation.
Rob Lowe in ITV’s 9-1-1: Lone Star
9-1-1: Lone Star
The story revolves around fancy pants New York firefighter Rob Lowe (last seen starring in the oddly similar show Wild Bill on ITV). Now, already you’ve probably done a double-take and wondered “fancy pants New York firefighter? Since when have they ever been fancy pants?”
Bear with me. All will be explained.
Cityslicker Lowe was one of the first responders to 9/11 and he was forced to rebuild his team of firefighters from scratch following that tragedy. This makes him a figure of interest to the Austin, Texas, fire department, when a tragedy befalls their firefighters. Needing someone who also ‘gets’ diversity – mainly to avoid lawsuits but also because Austin ain’t what it used to be – they invite Lowe down to work his magic, which Lowe agrees to once he learns he has cancer.
Gay, addict son in tow, Lowe starts to reform the department in his new town, recruiting Latinos, transmen and Muslim women Instagram stars from all over the country – and they aren’t just diverse, they can also get the job down. Making things even more alluring to Lowe is the fact the captain of the paramedics is none other than Liv Tyler. Will romance bloom? And can Austin take Lowe and his ‘Gucci loafers’?
In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm ET, Paramount In the UK: Not yet acquired
The army has become a Hallowed Thing in the US in the past 30 years or so. Maybe it’s a backlash agains the attitudes to Vietnam and those serving in it that spawned numerous scathing dramas and comedies in cinemas and on TV. Whatever the cause, whenever a new TV US show turns up about the army, it’s rarely ‘all knives out’ these days.
Certainly, it’s hard to imagine M*A*S*H lasting 11 seasons and getting 125 million viewers for its final episode now. Soldiers having relationships with one another? Soldiers trying to get discharged for wearing women’s clothing? Inconceivable.
And you can tell that not pure conjecture on my part by looking at the reaction to 68 Whiskey, an adaptation Yes (Israel)’s Charlie Golf One that it is pretty much a M*A*S*H for our times. Or at least something that tries to be.
In the US: Sundays, 9pm, HBO In the UK: Mondays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic
We seem to be enjoying something of a Stephen King resurgence of late. Time was, back in the 70s and the 80s, you couldn’t move for classic Stephen King movies, such as Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Christine. Then came the 90s and some not especially classic Stephen King TV series such as The Tommyknockers and The Langoliers.
After that, despite King’s continuing literary output, adaptations died off for about a decade. There was the occasional new effort, such as a TV version of The Dead Zone, but those were reasonably rare in comparison. It wasn’t really until 2010 and Haven followed by Under the Dome in 2013 that TV and film rediscovered King. Since then, we’ve had a new It, Doctor Sleep, 11.22.63, another The Mist, Mr Mercedes and Castle Rock, to name but a few – and with more to come this year, including a new version of The Stand.
King, of course, isn’t simply a horror writer and his tone varies from book to book. Let us not forget that The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile are both adaptations of King stories.
So I can’t say I’m too surprised to discover that the latest adaptation of King’s work, The Outsider, is as much The Wire as it is a piece of horror.
Inside The Outsider
In fact, you’d be forgiven – for about the first episode, at least – for thinking The Outsider isn’t even a piece of horror, just a regular old police procedural about the murder of a school child and how that affects a small town community. Adapted by Richard Price (The Deuce, Clockers, Child 44, The Night Of), it sees local detective Ben Mendelsohn (Captain Marvel, Animal Kingdom, Bloodline) in hot pursuit of the school coach (Jason Bateman).
All the evidence seems to suggest that it’s Bateman wot dunnit. All the witnesses clearly identify him, his blood and genetic evidence is all over the body and the van used to abduct the boy, and there’s video footage of him in blood-stained clothing. So cast-iron is the evidence that Mendelsohn has him arrested in front of the entire school without asking him even a question.
Unfortunately for Mendelsohn, Bateman has an equally cast-iron alibi – he was out of town at a teaching convention and not only is there physical evidence that he was there and multiple witnesses, public access TV recorded him at the exact time the murder took place.
Has there been a mix-up or can Bateman genuinely be in two places at once?
Alan Moore’s Watchmen is probably the best, most influential superhero comic of all time. An examination of the underlying assumptions and psychology of people who would put on masks to fight crime, it almost single-handedly (bar Denny O’Neil) made superheroes ‘real’ – or about as realistic as they ever could be, of course.
But it’s a very dense text and while you can remove certain elements of it relatively easily – bye, bye pirates! – try to unpick it too much and you lose Watchmen‘s intrinsic field: what makes Watchmen what it is. Small wonder then that Hollywood spent forever trying to adapt it before essentially making a frame by frame adaptation of the comic, just with a slightly different McGuffin.
That density of writing means that despite its influence being felt throughout comics and TV, there have been very few straight-on ‘homages’ (aka rip-offs). Nobody has done ‘Watchmen in space’, ‘Watchmen on Middle Earth’ or anything else.
One of the other reasons it’s so rarely adapted is it’s a “sacred text”. So perfect is it considered, no element of it can be removed or changed without true believers getting the hump. Even Zach Snyder’s movie version, which was virtually a frame for frame adaptation of the graphic novel, ended up getting into hot water for changing the ending.
To be fair, it was both a better ending than the graphic novel’s and a necessary adaptation, given the first season finale of Heroes had already used it. But it tampered with the good book, so it was excommunicated.
Faithfully unfaithful to Watchmen
This leads to a problem.
You could do utterly faithful adaptations and get into trouble with the only people who care, but why bother – everyone might as well just read the book.
