The movie industry are always remaking old TV shows (The A-Team arrived last summer, The Smurfs are due soon), but which current/recent TV show most deserves a cinematic interpretation? Doctor Who and perhaps Torchwood feel like no-brainers, and a 24 movie is apparently aiming for a 2012 release, but are most TV shows impossible to translate because they work better as a serialized story?
I can't really see Dexter working in movie form; well, the concept could easily have been a film, but coming up with a worthy film-length story five years into its run? Not happening. Likewise, True Blood. Well, okay, perhaps True Blood could condense a whole book into a two-hour format. But are enough non-fans at least aware of the show to entice them into the cinema? Look at what happened when Serenity released into a world where only a minority knew it was based on an axed TV series called Firefly. It was hardly a runaway success. You need a genuine TV phenomenon to achieve that, but so many shows that fit that description are impossible to replicate on the silver screen -- like Lost.
But actually, we're overlooking a perfect candidate to make an easy leap to the big screen: Glee. An easy concept to explain, with an established fan-base large enough to create a High School Musical-esque hit around the world. I can already imagine a Sing-A-Long version being released to DVD, too. And 3D, of course. Sorry, "3-Glee".
What else? Primeval? Easily done! Flight Of The Conchords? An instant cult hit, surely. Chuck? Uh, very unlikely. Breaking Bad or Mad Men? It's just not happening.
Ideally, you need a show with a simple format that tends to tell episodic stories on the smallscreen, so the leap to the big-screen feels like an opportunity to paint on a bigger canvas. There are fewer candidates around nowadays, given how the TV trend is to embrace things most movies can't easily do -- like tell serialized stories over many years.
But do you have any suggestions?
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