The Medium is Not Enough

In the US: Sundays, 9/8c, ABC

Kevin Williamson’s arm slumped to his side, the remote control loose in his grasp. The room was silent now, silent as a single tear rolled down his cheek.

“When Alexander saw the depth of his empire he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer,” he repeated to himself. “So right. Hans was so right.”

Williamson was inconsolable. He owed everything to serial killers. Everything. His entire career had started with Scream but how he wished that he could escape them now, to develop sweet, lovely little shows.

But every time he’d strayed, every time he’d tried to develop a Dawson’s Creek or Hidden Palms or adapt another young adult book to make a Vampire Diaries or The Secret Circle, he’d been forced to return to the minds of these misogynistic sociopaths. Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 4 and then The Following had all drawn him back in.

Except now The Following had been cancelled. What was he to do? Three seasons of The Following. Three! He must have exhausted every serial killer permutation in the book. Worse – people were becoming jaded with serial killers. They had… over-kill!

Williamson would have chuckled at that, if there had been even the slightest trace of joy in his life. There was nothing left. He ruled… nothing.

If only there were some way to make serial killers better, to truly catch the public imagination once again, just as they had all those years ago.

If a light bulb could have appeared about Williamson’s head, it would have done. All those years reading books hadn’t been for nothing after all! What if he could bring the most popular serial killer ever into modern times to save him? What if he could bring Jack the Ripper himself into the present day?

And he knew just how. He reached over to his bookcase and took out Time After Time by Karl Alexander. He opened it. In the hollowed out centre of the book was the DVD of the movie, Time After Time, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer.

He put the disc into the machine and pressed play on his remote control.

Yes, this will work. And he already knew how he could turn it into a TV series. Just with someone a bit hotter than Malcolm McDowell or David Warner…

Continue reading “Review: Time After Time 1×1-1×2 (US: ABC)”