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.
Alan Sepinwall
Last week, I wrote about the better TV adaptations of films. Today, we've got the inverse: movies that adapt television shows, with new actors reinterpreting familiar roles. The series will conclude with a look at movie continuations of TV shows (like the Shatner and Stewart Star Trek films, or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), where the original actors reprised their roles. (Also, look for a Mandalorian and Grogu review.)
The continuations category dates all the way back to the mid-Fifties, when Jack Webb made a 90-minute Dragnet film after years of the radio and TV versions. The oldest American movie adaptation of a TV show that I can find is Herbert Ross's 1981 film version of Pennies from Heaven(*), based on the 1979 British miniseries written by the great Dennis Potter, who even wrote the film's screenplay. But the adaptation game didn't really kick off until the late Eighties — with, appropriately, a Dragnet film. This was a comedy, starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, and it was pretty dire, including the two stars performing the rap song "City of Crime."
(*) Pennies from Heaven was one of the films chosen by my old colleague Drew McWeeny when we teamed up on the Screen Drafts podcast to pick the best examples of this phenomenon circa spring of 2020. Our top pick wound up being Brian DePalma's classic 1987 gangster film The Untouchables. After the episode published, Screen Drafts regular (and Game of Thrones writer/producer) Bryan Cogman pointed out that the film was not an adaptation of the Fifties TV show with Robert Stack, but was instead based on a 1957 memoir by the real Eliot Ness. We can't re-record the podcast, but I can at least omit that movie from this list, no matter how much I love it. And I somehow still haven't seen either version of Pennies from Heaven, despite adoring Potter's The Singing Detective miniseries.