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The Truth Is Out There: TV Adaptations Don’t Always Succeed
Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, writer-director Michael Patrick King and Cynthia Nixon score box office gold with the big-screen version of Sex and the City.
This Friday, writer-director Chris Carter, creator of the Emmy Award-winning series “The X-Files,” is reuniting FBI agents Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, respectively) in the long-awaited feature film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. While this is the first time the adored, truth-seeking duo has been paired since the series finale in 2002, it is actually their second rendezvous with the big screen. At the peak of their show’s popularity in 1998, Carter’s special agents filmed The X-Files: The Movie, which received only lukewarm reviews by both critics and fans.
This latest installment of “The X-Files’” saga is far from being a trendsetter in Hollywood. For years, studio executives have followed a simple formula to cash in on certain franchises: Take a widely acclaimed television show, modernize and condense it into a 90-minute script and out comes an instant crowd-pleaser. Though a handful of TV adaptations have triumphed and achieved critical acclaim, many television-to-film adaptations fail miserably, ultimately revealing that oftentimes the jokes, drama and supernatural should be left to the small screen.
Here then are 10 TV-to-film adaptations—most recent one first—that rendered mixed results, plus three television shows that bucked the trend when they were adapted for the small screen after success as feature films.
Sex and the City (2008)
Initially praised as “the” show for modern women, Sex and the City: The Movie is now being hailed as a cinematic “phenomenon” as Sarah Jessica Parker and co. raked in more than $56 million in its opening weekend. While the award-winning HBO series was revolutionary in proving that women do not have to be limited to the Lifetime Channel, the film showed that women are interesting and captivating enough to carry a film, a notion that left Hollywood moguls shocked.
Get Smart (2008)
Comedian Mel Brooks has no problem selling out his earlier creations these days, but his fans sure do. When the remake was announced, many worried that the subdued comedy of the legendary Don Adams could not be surpassed. While Steve Carell is the current master of deadpan, it’s the film’s writing that does not match up to Buck Henry and Mel Brooks’ dry wit and unfortunately resorts to slapstick, pedestrian humor that hardly does Maxwell Smart any justice.
Many comedy sketches have attempted to bring their act to the big screen and failed (see the “Saturday Night Live” Coneheads and Mary Katherine Gallagher characters). The exception is Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, the blissfully ignorant Kazakhstan citizen just trying to find his footing in America. Adapted from the series of sketches on “Da Ali G Show,” Cohen manages to unearth new characters and situations to keep his humor fresh throughout the Academy Award-nominated film and as a result, turns Borat into everyone’s favorite Kazakhstan citizen despite his unintentional vulgarity.
Bewitched (2005)
The television show won Emmys; the film won Razzies. The new, yet much less-improved, Bewitched tried to be cute and clever by creating a post-modern set-up of a film within a film and unfortunately turned into an excruciatingly painful romantic comedy, where the two leads (Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman) share zero chemistry. Maybe its just hard to follow in the footsteps of such classic acting, for as much as she tried, Kidman completely floundered trying to imitate Elizabeth Montgomery’s effortless grace.
Scooby-Doo (2002)
Hollywood loves to bring childhood classics to the big screen, this time in a live-action remake of the classic cartoon about an intelligent dog and his mystery-solving crew. The film’s first mistake was the horrific CGI dog as Scooby-Doo; the second, casting Freddie Prinze Jr. Sure, the kids may like it, but there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Scooby gang looks—not to mention acts—a lot better in 2D.
When this Golden Globe-nominated series debuted in the 1970s, it was one of the first to star women as not only sex symbols but crime fighters. When the 2000 film resurrected the intriguing trio by replacing ‘70s icon Farrah Fawcett with the hottest women of the new millennium (Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu), and added some fresh hairdos, high-tech gadgets and kick-ass moves into the mix, the result was a whole new girl-power movement that was just as fierce and fun as it was 30 years ago.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by A. Buckman on 11/16/08 at 12:16 am
It’s Sunnydale, not Sunnyvale for _Buffy_....
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