‘Friday the 13th’ Becoming TV Series – The Daily Double Talk
By Tommy McGrew
MTV what the fuck have you done?! Ever since you came out with Scream the TV series people have been telling me how much they’ve been enjoying the show. Not only how much they’ve been surprised that the shows not only entertaining but it’s also just plain good (not great) but once that show debuted it was like a lightbulb popped up above everyone in Hollywood’s head and they asked themselves, “why the fuck are slasher movies not being turned into TV shows? It’s brilliant! We must get on this bandwagon!” So it appears we have the next man up which is Jason Voorhees that’s right Friday the 13th is being turned into a TV series for wait for the CW, who is basically MTV’s unofficial rival (ABC Family I see you too).
Director Sean Cunningham, who directed the original Friday the 13th in 1980, is set to executive produce with Randall Emmett and George Furla set to produce. The series will feature Voorhees but promises “a stronger feel of grounded reality” They want it to be a smart horror-thriller rather than just a run-of-the-mill slasher show. Although the plot is vague, it will center around a detective who’s brother goes missing around the same time Jason Voorhees, who everyone thought was dead, shows back up.
None of this surprises me one bit it actually kind of excites me a little, because I was one of those people who thought turning a slasher film into a slasher TV series is something that Matt only needed to happen but was kind of long overdue. We are in such a great time for television right now people call it the golden age of television for a reason. We’ve learned that you can do a lot on television, far more than you can do a movie. We all know this, obviously, right, so you have to respect the fact that someone’s taking a genre that has been trapped in a cage for decades and is finally setting free. One thing I’ve learned from watching scream that the main problem with slasher films is we don’t care about the characters which is pretty much the biggest sin of any film. So when you have a television series you have to know those characters you have 8 to 12 episodes with all of them so you learn things about him that you would never learn in the confines of a film, which makes you more connected to them. That way when they die, it’s impactful that is a formula that works a little too well. Which means Friday the 13th and Scream are probably not the last of this slasher TV series thing. From what I’m seeing something tells me it might even become something of a craze here pretty soon.
[Source: Movieweb]