May is a big month for the crossing of the barrier between film and television. We've got multiple TV shows based on films, including Netflix's Man on Fire, Starz's Amadeus miniseries, and the return of Netflix's The Four Seasons. And following on the heels of last month's release of the Peaky Blinders movie, Amazon will be streaming a movie where John Krasinski reprises the title role from his Jack Ryan series, while the first Star Wars film in seven years will be TV spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu. So it seemed like a good time to look at the complicated history of when stories try to move from one medium to the other, in a three-part series.
Today, we've got TV adaptations of films. Next week, I'll dive into the better examples of movies adapted from TV shows (like The Fugitive). And later this month, I'll write about when movies function as continuations of TV shows, with the original actors reprising their roles.
A sentiment I often encountered when studying television prior to this career was that making a TV show based on a movie never worked — except for when it did. When I was growing up, two of the most ubiquitous shows in repeat syndication were adapted from popular films. When I went into the TV criticism game in the mid-Nineties, one of the earliest great shows I wrote about (and kept writing about, all the way into a section of The Revolution Was Televised) was based on another movie. So clearly the idea can work, even if it usually doesn't.
So what allows some of these to be brilliant, while others struggle to recapture the magic of the source material? As I'll get into below when talking about specific successes, there are a few keys. First, the premise of the film has to be open-ended enough to lend itself to the ongoing narrative structure of a TV show; among the big problems with recent adaptations like Man on Fire is that they're trying to turn a story meant to run for two hours into something that lasts many multiples of that.
Alan Sepinwall
Second, there has to be a specific take on the material — whether that's something the performers are doing, a stylistic choice by the creative team, or whatever — and/or there has to be something so universal in the source material that it doesn't require the original cast and crew to work.
Though there were some notable film-to-TV adaptations in the Fifties and Sixties, the concept didn't really take hold until the Seventies, which is where we'll start, going in chronological order through some of the highlights of the process.