Six Respectable Adaptations of TV Shows
And Now for Something Completely Different (1971): The vaults of bad cinema are to a great extent taken up by TV-based movies, though before it become an epidemic in Hollywood, Britain was the top perpetrator. Through the ’70s, most of the BBC schedule wound up on big screens, though only Monty Python played it smart. Pre- Holy Grail the troupe volleyed for American love by making this compilation film, offering recreations of the best from their first two seasons. Not great, but good enough.
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988): Canceled “because the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it,” Police Squad! —the ZAZ team’s brilliant gag-a-second, post- Airplane! show—had a far more cherished second life as a film series.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992): Made after the show’s quasi-disastrous second season, David Lynch’s prequel was met with a mix of hostility and indifference. But time has been kind. David Foster Wallace made a strong case for it as a vivid and potent exploration of Laura Palmer—ferociously played by Sheryl Lee—as a riot of tortured contradictions: the whore and the prom queen at once.
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995): In which filmmakers found a genuinely clever way around how to milk a show that already seemed surreally dated when it aired: Do fish-out-of-water.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (2007): At 15 minutes, the Adult Swim champ is a delirious burst of surrealist nuttiness. At 86 minutes it’s virtually mind-melting—the L’Âge d’Or to the show’s succinct Un Chien Andalou .
In the Loop (2009): A spin-off of the BBC government comedy The Thick of It , Armando Iannucci’s hyper-profane Strangelove -ian satire adds Americans like James Gandolfini and even assigns most of the show’s cast new characters. And yet it still feels like multiple episodes of the show strung together. Which is a good thing. TV and cinema, finally, are no longer that different.
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1. Matt Prigge said... on Jul 29, 2009 at 12:06PM
“Incidentally! No, I didn't forget about the Firefly spin-off Serenity, nor South Park: BL&U, both of which I like more than some of the members of this list. I just wanted to cover more ground on the subject, and wanted to avoid saying, "Oh, hey, here's yet another film based on a TV show that's really darn good." Sheath those knives.”