I may finally have to give up on America’s television industry. I was a big boob-tube watcher in my youth, but over the last decade, I’ve found little to enjoy on the small
screen. It has gotten to the point where I use my TV set primarily to watch DVDs. This fall, I added only two shows to my regular viewing schedule--The Blacklist (which I really enjoy, even though co-star Megan Boone is no match for the sinisterly charismatic James Spader) and The Michael J. Fox Show (for purely sentimental reasons). I don’t see a great deal of creativity or originality coming from the TV networks or--with the notable exception of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom--the cable channels. And news that ABC is hoping to introduce a new series about Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s renowned private eye, is unlikely to change things.
“The project ...,” reports Deadline Hollywood, “is described as a smart, sexy, and stylish update of Chandler’s character which follows the investigations of wisecracking, edgy, and rugged private detective Philip Marlowe as he navigates the morally complicated world of today’s Los Angeles--where the bright California sun casts long and dangerous shadows ... and where true love can be more difficult to find than justice. [Castle creator-showrunner Andrew] Marlowe is writing the script with his wife, Castle writer/consulting producer Terri Edda Miller, through their MilMar Pictures.”
This marks the third time ABC-TV has endeavored to reanimate the ghost of Philip Marlowe for its own ratings benefit. In 1959, Philip Carey starred in a short-lived, half-hour drama based on Chandler’s P.I. In 2007, the network again got excited about Marlowe, thanks to a pilot starring Irish actor Jason O’Mara. However, that project was eventually dropped, and O’Mara went on to star in U.S. version of
Life on Mars. Aside from the Carey show, the only other successful effort at bringing Marlowe to TV screens came in 1983, when British network ITV launched Philip
Marlowe, Private Eye, a period detective serial starring Powers Booth.
It ran for two seasons, with each of its 11 episodes based on a different Chandler short story.
American television has done a demonstrably poor job of resurrecting classic series. Ironside, Charlie’s Angels, Knight Rider, The Night Stalker, The Bionic Woman--they’ve all come and gone before most viewers even knew they were on. And plans to reintroduce The Rockford Files (with the un-tough Dermot Mulroney trying to fill James
Garner’s shoes) died early, thank goodness. Yet we’ve recently heard of plans
to reboot Remington Steele as a comedy-drama for NBC, and CBS wants to revive Murder,
She Wrote with The Help’s Octavia Spencer as a self-published mystery novelist fascinated by true crimes.
Handing Philip Marlowe over to the folks behind Castle might ensure that a pilot film is at least made. But I have to say, Castle is altogether too cute and formulaic for my taste. I can’t see Raymond Chandler being happy
that its developers have been selected to bring his iconic Los Angeles gumshoe back to the screen.
(Hat tip to Shotsmag Confidential.)
READ MORE: “Voice Without a Face: Finding a Face for Philip Marlowe,” by David Vineyard (Mystery*File).
Showing posts with label TV Reboots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV Reboots. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Flamin’ Out
Don’t presume that I was in any way surprised by the news that NBC-TV has cancelled Ironside, Blair Underwood’s sorta/kinda remake of Raymond Burr’s classic series of that same name.
I wanted to like this new show--really, I did--but right away it turned me off. Underwood can be an excellent performer; however, he was definitely not Robert T. Ironside, at least not the perspicacious, sniper-damaged, and chili-loving former chief of detectives remembered fondly by viewers of the 1967-1975 series. He came off as too tough, too violent--nothing like the foul-mouthed, yet compassionate character Burr offered to viewers. (That’s one of the principal risks of trying to remake a familiar program: Producers want very much to capitalize on the original, but any “new” show is inevitably compared with--and commonly suffers by contrast with--whatever it’s trying to imitate.) Another strike against this reboot was the decision to move the action from San Francisco to New York City. Why bother? And the small team of plainclothes cops Underwood’s Ironside assembled never seemed very interesting or cohesive. The whole cast appeared to be going through the motions of making a gritty cop series, without actually delivering anything out of the ordinary.
The fourth and final episode of NBC’s second shot at Ironside will air this coming Wednesday, October 23, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. (A fifth installment has evidently been made, but there is no word of whether it will ever be broadcast.) Hmm. Four episodes? That’s only 194 fewer than were produced of Burr’s original crime drama.
I wanted to like this new show--really, I did--but right away it turned me off. Underwood can be an excellent performer; however, he was definitely not Robert T. Ironside, at least not the perspicacious, sniper-damaged, and chili-loving former chief of detectives remembered fondly by viewers of the 1967-1975 series. He came off as too tough, too violent--nothing like the foul-mouthed, yet compassionate character Burr offered to viewers. (That’s one of the principal risks of trying to remake a familiar program: Producers want very much to capitalize on the original, but any “new” show is inevitably compared with--and commonly suffers by contrast with--whatever it’s trying to imitate.) Another strike against this reboot was the decision to move the action from San Francisco to New York City. Why bother? And the small team of plainclothes cops Underwood’s Ironside assembled never seemed very interesting or cohesive. The whole cast appeared to be going through the motions of making a gritty cop series, without actually delivering anything out of the ordinary.
The fourth and final episode of NBC’s second shot at Ironside will air this coming Wednesday, October 23, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. (A fifth installment has evidently been made, but there is no word of whether it will ever be broadcast.) Hmm. Four episodes? That’s only 194 fewer than were produced of Burr’s original crime drama.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Bullet Points: Columbus Day Edition
• Congratulations to Raven’s Head Press, a new independent publisher, on its launch and the debut of its first book, Gilbert Collins’ The Starkenden Quest, which was originally released back in 1925. “Plans are to reissue [works of] adventure, crime, and supernatural fiction that exemplify the kind of gripping and exciting stories
published in the long-gone pulp magazines and the vintage paperback imprints
like Dell Mapbacks and Gold Medal,” part-time bookseller J.F. Norris explains in his fine blog. He adds: “We are currently looking at books by Dorothy B. Hughes, Ramona Stewart, Lionel White, Hugh Wheeler (aka Patrick Quentin and Q Patrick), Samuel Taylor, and Walter Van Tillburg Clark. We are also in
negotiations to obtain exclusive American reprint rights for the reissue of the
books of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.” Norris, who contributed the
introduction to this new edition of Starkeden, is offering two free copies of the novel through a contest, but you’ll have to act fast to have a shot at winning one: entries will be accepted only through Wednesday of this week. Click here to participate.
• Meanwhile, critic and editor Mike Ripley tells me that Ostara Publishing is readying new editions of two novels featuring Margery Allingham’s aristocratic sleuth, Albert Campion. Both were penned by her husband, journalist-designer Philip Youngman Carter, after Allingham’s demise in 1966. Those books, as you’ll see from this post in the blog Tipping My Fedora, are Mr. Campion’s Farthing (1969) and Mr. Campion’s Falcon (1970). Learn more about Carter here.
• Do we really need a new version of Remington Steele, the 1982-1978 NBC-TV comedy-drama that launched Pierce Brosnan’s cinematic career? According to Deadline Hollywood, the program “is getting a next-generation reboot, this time as a half-hour comedy.” The reboot, we’re told, “follows Olivia Holt, the daughter of Remington Steele and Laura Holt, as she reopens the once-world-famous Remington Steele Detective Agency--only to fall into the same hilarious, action-packed, romantic entanglements of her parents.” Now, I was very fond of the original Remington Steele, primarily because I enjoyed watching lovely Stephanie Zimbalist--who played Los Angeles private eye Laura Holt--try to manage the unmanageable, fiction-come-to-life Steele (Brosnan), while also solving crimes every week. (I enjoyed, too, the show’s opening sequence, with music by Henry Mancini.) But hasn’t history already proved the sheer folly of trying to restart classic boob-tube shows? Aside from Battlestar Gallactica and Hawaii Five-O, such attempts have been disastrous. Need I mention Charlie’s Angels, Knight Rider, Ironside, or the worst idea of all, a non-James Garner resurrection of The Rockford Files? Perhaps it would be kindest to dump any “new” Remington Steele series--especially one with a stupid laugh track and shallow crime plots (for what else can you expect from a half-hour show?)--right off the bat. Before a cast is even hired or dollar one spent.
• Here’s a death I failed to mention: Henry F. (“Hank”) Simms, an Oklahoma native who went on to become a familiar announcer on many of producer Quinn Martin’s TV crime dramas (including The FBI, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones), died on August 7 of this year in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Bill Koenig, managing editor of The HMSS Weblog, alerted me to Simms’ passing and includes in this post more of the deceased’s biographical details, along with some clips of the voice work he did over the years. Simms was 90 years old. “I’m surprised [his death] hasn’t gotten more attention, but that’s how things go,” Koenig concludes. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has posted its own belated Simms obituary here.
• I was very sorry to hear that New York-born novelist Oscar Hijuelos--who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love--died on Sunday at the youthful age of 62. In addition to Mambo Kings, I was also delighted with his 2002 work, A Simple Habana Melody, and have Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010) on a shelf, still waiting to be enjoyed. More on Hijuelos here.
• When Dorchester Publishing severed ties with Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime line of paperback novels back in 2010, it also seemed to end Ardai’s parallel series of adventure tales featuring Gabriel Hunt, six of which had by then seen print. Hard Case went on to strike a deal with Titan Books that has greatly extended the line. But only now does word come--from James Reasoner, who wrote one of the Hunt installments (Hunt at the Well of Eternity)--that new editions of the Hunt titles “are on the way.” Unfortunately, those six reissued works won’t carry their original, pulpy covers, illustrated by Glen Orbik (and still to be appreciated in this post). However, Reasoner insists “the new covers are pretty snazzy, too.”
UPDATE: I e-mailed Charles Ardai earlier today to ask whether there might be more Gabriel Hunt stories in the future. His response:
• My own humble remarks about William Boyd’s Solo are included in this sampling of critical comments on that new James Bond novel.
• I haven’t yet got around to reading Kathleen Kent’s new Western thriller, The Outcasts. But author-blogger Erica Mailman has posted this interview with Kent that, although too damn short, nonetheless heightens my curiosity about the novel.
• Is the Republican Party flirting with suicide?
• The Crimespree Magazine blog offers a preview of Mob City, the “three-week television event,” due to begin on TNT on Wednesday, December 4. That drama is based on John Buntin’s 2009 non-fiction work, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City. After last year’s Gangster Squad, some viewers might be leery of another tale rooted in Los Angeles’ criminal past, but the clip from Mob City certainly makes this new production look promising.
• And A Shroud of Thoughts writer Terence Towles Canote has put together an excellent backgrounder on Four Star Productions, which was once responsible for producing such classic small-screen series as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Burke’s Law, The Rogues, Harry Guardino’s Monty Nash, The Rifleman, and The Big Valley.
• Meanwhile, critic and editor Mike Ripley tells me that Ostara Publishing is readying new editions of two novels featuring Margery Allingham’s aristocratic sleuth, Albert Campion. Both were penned by her husband, journalist-designer Philip Youngman Carter, after Allingham’s demise in 1966. Those books, as you’ll see from this post in the blog Tipping My Fedora, are Mr. Campion’s Farthing (1969) and Mr. Campion’s Falcon (1970). Learn more about Carter here.
• Do we really need a new version of Remington Steele, the 1982-1978 NBC-TV comedy-drama that launched Pierce Brosnan’s cinematic career? According to Deadline Hollywood, the program “is getting a next-generation reboot, this time as a half-hour comedy.” The reboot, we’re told, “follows Olivia Holt, the daughter of Remington Steele and Laura Holt, as she reopens the once-world-famous Remington Steele Detective Agency--only to fall into the same hilarious, action-packed, romantic entanglements of her parents.” Now, I was very fond of the original Remington Steele, primarily because I enjoyed watching lovely Stephanie Zimbalist--who played Los Angeles private eye Laura Holt--try to manage the unmanageable, fiction-come-to-life Steele (Brosnan), while also solving crimes every week. (I enjoyed, too, the show’s opening sequence, with music by Henry Mancini.) But hasn’t history already proved the sheer folly of trying to restart classic boob-tube shows? Aside from Battlestar Gallactica and Hawaii Five-O, such attempts have been disastrous. Need I mention Charlie’s Angels, Knight Rider, Ironside, or the worst idea of all, a non-James Garner resurrection of The Rockford Files? Perhaps it would be kindest to dump any “new” Remington Steele series--especially one with a stupid laugh track and shallow crime plots (for what else can you expect from a half-hour show?)--right off the bat. Before a cast is even hired or dollar one spent.
• Here’s a death I failed to mention: Henry F. (“Hank”) Simms, an Oklahoma native who went on to become a familiar announcer on many of producer Quinn Martin’s TV crime dramas (including The FBI, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones), died on August 7 of this year in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Bill Koenig, managing editor of The HMSS Weblog, alerted me to Simms’ passing and includes in this post more of the deceased’s biographical details, along with some clips of the voice work he did over the years. Simms was 90 years old. “I’m surprised [his death] hasn’t gotten more attention, but that’s how things go,” Koenig concludes. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has posted its own belated Simms obituary here.
• I was very sorry to hear that New York-born novelist Oscar Hijuelos--who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love--died on Sunday at the youthful age of 62. In addition to Mambo Kings, I was also delighted with his 2002 work, A Simple Habana Melody, and have Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010) on a shelf, still waiting to be enjoyed. More on Hijuelos here.
• When Dorchester Publishing severed ties with Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime line of paperback novels back in 2010, it also seemed to end Ardai’s parallel series of adventure tales featuring Gabriel Hunt, six of which had by then seen print. Hard Case went on to strike a deal with Titan Books that has greatly extended the line. But only now does word come--from James Reasoner, who wrote one of the Hunt installments (Hunt at the Well of Eternity)--that new editions of the Hunt titles “are on the way.” Unfortunately, those six reissued works won’t carry their original, pulpy covers, illustrated by Glen Orbik (and still to be appreciated in this post). However, Reasoner insists “the new covers are pretty snazzy, too.”
UPDATE: I e-mailed Charles Ardai earlier today to ask whether there might be more Gabriel Hunt stories in the future. His response:
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of more Hunt books. Certainly if the original six prove popular with readers in their reissued form we’ll have an incentive to do more. I have no shortage of plot ideas, if it comes to that. (And if I ever ran out, I know James and my other fellow Hunt-ers have even more fertile imaginations than I do.)• James Ellroy is returning to the 1940s with four crime novels, beginning with Perfidia, due out from Knopf in the fall of 2014.
It’s entirely a question of whether readers want more. It would be fun if they did.
• My own humble remarks about William Boyd’s Solo are included in this sampling of critical comments on that new James Bond novel.
• I haven’t yet got around to reading Kathleen Kent’s new Western thriller, The Outcasts. But author-blogger Erica Mailman has posted this interview with Kent that, although too damn short, nonetheless heightens my curiosity about the novel.
• Is the Republican Party flirting with suicide?
• The Crimespree Magazine blog offers a preview of Mob City, the “three-week television event,” due to begin on TNT on Wednesday, December 4. That drama is based on John Buntin’s 2009 non-fiction work, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City. After last year’s Gangster Squad, some viewers might be leery of another tale rooted in Los Angeles’ criminal past, but the clip from Mob City certainly makes this new production look promising.
• And A Shroud of Thoughts writer Terence Towles Canote has put together an excellent backgrounder on Four Star Productions, which was once responsible for producing such classic small-screen series as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Burke’s Law, The Rogues, Harry Guardino’s Monty Nash, The Rifleman, and The Big Valley.
Monday, December 10, 2012
New Wheels on an Old Concept?
I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in NBC-TV. When I was a boy back in the 1970s, it was my favorite American entertainment network, offering not only the fabled NBC Mystery Movie (Columbo! McMillan & Wife! Banacek!), but also The Rockford Files, The Magician, City of Angels, Ellery Queen, Petrocelli, Banyon, Search, Police Story, and the now largely forgotten Kingston:
Confidential. NBC went on to solidify my loyalty by scheduling such other
classics as Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Crime Story, and The West Wing.
Nowadays, though, do you know how many NBC shows I watch? One. That’s right, of my hours of boob-tube viewing each week, the only NBC series I regularly tune in is Tuesday night’s Parenthood. The network has practically fallen off my radar.
And I’m unlikely to spend more time with NBC, if it continues to make stupid decisions. Two years ago, the network tried to launch a remake of The Rockford Files, starring Dermot Mulroney. Fortunately, the project was soon shelved.
But now NBC hopes to resurrect another well-remembered drama: Ironside, the 1967-1975 series starring Raymond Burr as the San Francisco Police Department’s wheelchair-bound former chief of detectives. According to New York magazine’s Vulture site,
On the other hand, Burr’s Robert T. Ironside was a more surly sort, a chili-consuming spitter of TV-acceptable epithets (“flaming” being his favorite substitute for a certain other f-word). Because the character never struck me as reflective of the actor’s real personality, I can picture the part being taken by someone else--maybe Vincent D’Onofrio of Law & Order: Criminal Intent fame, or John Goodman. (I can even see Willem Dafoe making the Ironside role his own, though he’s mostly given television a wide berth during his career.)
So I am not going to rail on at length here about the injustice of relaunching Ironside (although if, as the A.V. Club blog suggests, the network decides to turn Chief Ironside into a robot, I’ll be sharing with it some choice insults). I still think, however, that it’s idiotic and lazy for TV executives to keep trying to recapture the magic of once-popular programs. NBC has already failed with big-budget reboots of The Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, and The Munsters. Yet it has a rich history of coming up with creative concepts for programs and protagonists. Why can’t it take an honest shot at trying something fresh and risky once more? Or is that too much to ask of U.S. television in the 21st century?
Nowadays, though, do you know how many NBC shows I watch? One. That’s right, of my hours of boob-tube viewing each week, the only NBC series I regularly tune in is Tuesday night’s Parenthood. The network has practically fallen off my radar.
And I’m unlikely to spend more time with NBC, if it continues to make stupid decisions. Two years ago, the network tried to launch a remake of The Rockford Files, starring Dermot Mulroney. Fortunately, the project was soon shelved.
But now NBC hopes to resurrect another well-remembered drama: Ironside, the 1967-1975 series starring Raymond Burr as the San Francisco Police Department’s wheelchair-bound former chief of detectives. According to New York magazine’s Vulture site,
Michael Caleo, who wrote Luc Besson’s upcoming Tommy Lee Jones–Robert De Niro thriller Malavita, is working on a script for the Ironside reboot, with Dave Semel (Person of Interest) attached to direct the pilot if it’s ordered to production. We have no idea if producers plan to retain the very cool Quincy Jones theme song, but as in the original, Detective Ironside will once again be a sarcastic, sometimes-abrasive type who’s aided by a team of specialized experts that help him solve the toughest cases. We’re tempted to call this House in a wheelchair, but Ironside got there first--by about 40 years.I have to admit, I’m somewhat less opposed to remaking Ironside after all these decades than I was to the Rockford revival. In the latter case, actor James Garner was so closely entwined with his role as a compassionate and perpetually impecunious Los Angeles private eye, that I can’t imagine anyone else filling those same shoes. (And no, the goofy Vince Vaughn won’t do the job any better in a theatrical translation of Rockford than the too-gentle Mulroney might have done in a small-screen revision.)
On the other hand, Burr’s Robert T. Ironside was a more surly sort, a chili-consuming spitter of TV-acceptable epithets (“flaming” being his favorite substitute for a certain other f-word). Because the character never struck me as reflective of the actor’s real personality, I can picture the part being taken by someone else--maybe Vincent D’Onofrio of Law & Order: Criminal Intent fame, or John Goodman. (I can even see Willem Dafoe making the Ironside role his own, though he’s mostly given television a wide berth during his career.)
So I am not going to rail on at length here about the injustice of relaunching Ironside (although if, as the A.V. Club blog suggests, the network decides to turn Chief Ironside into a robot, I’ll be sharing with it some choice insults). I still think, however, that it’s idiotic and lazy for TV executives to keep trying to recapture the magic of once-popular programs. NBC has already failed with big-budget reboots of The Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, and The Munsters. Yet it has a rich history of coming up with creative concepts for programs and protagonists. Why can’t it take an honest shot at trying something fresh and risky once more? Or is that too much to ask of U.S. television in the 21st century?
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