Oh, yes, I loved Mockingbird Lane, too.
But I’m sure if it had gotten picked up it would have been cancelled after 13 episodes, or else Bryan Fuller would have left to work on something else.
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At least that means we’d actually be able to watch the darn thing! As of now I can’t find it anywhere!
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Since the movie was on TCM last night, I got to thinking how ABC tried a TV series version of Time After Time, where sexy handsome H.G. Wells tries to track down hunky smoldering Jack The Ripper.
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I found the Jordan Peele reboot frustratingly hit and miss. When it was good it was VERY good but there were a lot of real snoozers like the octopus episode, the meta-episode or the heavy-handed child president episode. But I loved the reimagining of the gremlin episode, the video recorder episode and the very last one was really neat in going really gonzo, both goofy and unsettling.
I also wish it could keep it down to a half hour. There are some stories that work in a longer form but I think the show works best in short form. That’s one great thing about the 80s series… it decides sometimes to get even shorter.
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Yeah the first season was difficult to watch. It did improve towards the end (and it’s always nice to have Dave Foley pop up from time to time) but too little too late. It’s hard to imagine that it was the show Matthew Perry spent so long trying to get going. Maybe he gave up trying to do his version and just tagged along for whatever he could get made.
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Cough…
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A while back, there was an announcement of a Max Headroom reboot, for which I am cautiously pessimistic. While the original 1980s show had some interesting (and occasionally prescient) ideas, it is kind of dated. I could imagine it being redone where twenty minutes in the future it’s the internet companies (as opposed to TV networks) being the ones controlling everything, and Edison Carter would be a prominent Vlogger. However, part of me just knows that they’ll screw it up if it does go into production.
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It would do all the bad reboots injustice to declare them less bad than one “worst” I might single out. Besides, a lot of others’ “worst” sounded so bad that I never gave them a chance.
Two that I did try were Fox’s Minority Report series and Fox’s Red Band Society. I guess technically Minority Report only “rebooted” the movie, but close enough. (The other “Americanized” a popular foreign series.) Neither lasted a season.
I was mostly writing to be thankful that there hadn’t been a reboot of the two classic anthology series Thriller and Night Gallery. But I see “SyFy” [sic] is already rolling with a Night Gallery reboot. Its description of “updated for the digital age” and “mining our fears of the dangers of social media” doesn’t give me much hope. But I’m still hoping for horror, not “make me laugh because I read about someone getting pranked like this.”
Oh, about the Max Headroom reboot: If its “edgy” take is that megacorps like Disney and Comcast (and now WB/Discovery?) either don’t exist or are heroic underdogs, it’ll be a hard pass for me.
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I would put “Gracepoint” (the American version of “Broadchurch”) on the list as well. It aired around a year after “Broadchurch” aired in the UK (about 6-7 months after it aired on BBC America), used large unedited chunks of the same scripts as the ITV series (giving it mostly no originality), and had to my eyes a much less talented cast which sapped most of the energy. There just seemed to be no real reason to make the show. Bringing back David Tennant should have helped, but his American accent was just not convincing to me and made his performance seem more comedic than intended.
I had thought that Chris Chibnall may have matured enough to be an OK writer after “Broadchurch” Series 1, but “Gracepoint”, “Broadchurch” Series 2, and his show running of “Doctor Who” continued to prove to me that he remained the same hack writer he was back in his “Torchwood” days.
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Because Black Mirror clearly never happened. 
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Not one, not two, but THREE attempts were made to make an American version of Fawlty Towers. The two above were dreadful.
Snavely, with Harvey Korman and Betty White, never got past the pilot. Too bad since, although far from perfect, it was reasonably humorous. It was the only one that John Cleese and Connie Booth were involved in.
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Poor John Larroquette, shafted again and again in the series they give him. His eponymous series was hilarious in the first season, then atrociously dulcified and neutered for the second.
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One good thing came out of the Larroquette version. It inspired me to check out the original show.
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Harvey Korman is the only one who could have pulled it off. Too bad the show wasn’t picked up.
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It’s hard to picture anyone not British really pulling off Basil Fawlty, since he needs to have an intrinsic culture of superciliousness and suppressed rage backing up his character. Still, it would be amusing as heck to see Darren McGavin’s take on the role. I could see him flying off the handle during the fire drill sequence…
I feel to make it work for ANYONE else but Cleese means basically making a different show. Not a bad thing, mind, since I think there are so many ways to do a pompous, self-important, rage-filled hotel owner.
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