Remakes. Ugh. (fart noise) They’re really making another Spiderman? Really?
Whether we like it or not remakes in the era of the Sheinhardt Wig media conglomerate are here to stay. There is something a little electric that happens to people when they hear the name of something they’ve heard before. That’s why studios are excited to make any book with a following into a movie. People crave the known. Anyone who’s ever done improv knows the gleam in the audiences eye when you pander to their uncouth lust for the known by bringing up the Care Bears or Captain O. G. Readmore. They love it. And they love you for doing it even if it makes you hate yourself.
Remakes (unless they’re of Spiderman) aren’t always bad pandering. There are times when the child surpasses the teacher. There was Numb3rs, which we all know was just a modern retelling of Mathnet, but Battlestar Galactica is probably the best example of this. I don’t know how many of you Cylon lovers are familiar with the 80’s original but it was… Well, let’s just say it doesn’t have a place in the golden age of television. But here came Ronald D. Moore fresh from killing lakes full of fish in Carnivale with an apocalyptic vision of a blonde in a red dress and he dredged Battlestar up from it’s schlocky roots and made it something wonderful.
This can happen to other shows! (Except The Rockford Files, it was already perfect) So here is my wish put out into the universe for 5 female leaning shows that could actually get made because there are still people who love the questionably good originals. If you want to steal any of these ideas I’d be happy to pitch with you.
Wow, did this show have some issues. I could never get through a whole episode because of a natural disinclination on my part for everything Hallmarkish. But she was a Medicine Woman! She was alone in the world except for the kids that I’m assuming are hers and the hunky guy who needs a shave that I vaguely remember doing a lot of rescuing.
How cool would a The Knick/Deadwood treatment on Dr. Quinn be? Exploring homesteading, prostitution, racism, sexism, STI’s and horse kicking injuries on the frontier! A forbidden romance (I’m assuming for some reason) between a ‘seen it all’ smart professional woman and a rough mountain man? Sign me up.
The campy exquisiteness of Pamela Anderson as the leader of a cadre of hot bodyguards can’t be overestimated. I’m never going to watch a second of this show again because I don’t want to risk it being terrible. Who am I kidding? I’m sure it was terrible. But it was also awesome. A remake could be even awesomer.
In the remake, Vallery Irons is still a hot bodyguard but this time she is the one who knocks. There are a lot of issues and a lot of great reading you can do about Hollywood’s reluctance to give us a truly unlikeable female protagonist in the vein of Tony Soprano or Walter White but here is an opportunity to do it. I see gritty, dark bodyguard stuff that sometimes only a bunch of hot female bodyguards can do. You can get into sex trafficking, the ugly side of strip clubs from the strippers point of view that the Bada Bing never showed us, ugly custody battles, dealing with the drug cartels, rape stings in frats and having to hand your perp over to that sexist law enforcement scum who will get all the credit anyway. This one is defiantly not for network.
If I remember correctly this show is sexy lady Data cop navigates her relationship with her sexy partner she doesn’t sexy while they solve crimes.
Since A. I . Artificial Intelligence is essentially this kind of remake of Small Wonder we’re going adult robot here. Since there is obviously some kind of fine for making a show that isn’t about cops this show is about cops. One of them is still a sexy robot. But in this golden age of television this gritty remake set in a not too distant future of sentient artificial intelligence, there are plenty of interesting things to deal with. The nature of attraction, and the exploration of why did you make your robot super sexy if she can’t do anything about it. Is this going to turn into a Skynet situation? WHAT IS LOVE? There are some issues touched on in the brilliant 2012 remake of Dredd about law enforcement in the future that a show like this could further explore. Also, sexy robot.
New Starbuck is a girl so Gilligan can be one too. Make the Skipper her dad. And no, this isn’t Lost. This is an honest to goodness shipwrecked disaster. People who are wholly unprepared to survive on their own are thrust into a live or die disaster. With only their day bag each. Not their whole wardrobe (I’m looking at you Ginger).
We’ve got near starvation, injuries, and interpersonal drama up the wazoo and perhaps even the occasional poacher or pirate or something. Maybe somebody dies? This is real life y’all.
So unlike last time in the new version I’m going to need way more than one woman in this show and I’m going to need at least 75% of the cast to not be white. Think Chiwetel Ejiofor moonlighting as an upper addled Taxi driver in Dirty Pretty Things, but funny. This is a gritty one-camera comedy that touches on issues of sex, drugs, immigration, class and race. The customers provide a built-in story engine and the drivers are so good they could step into either Louie or The Wire at a moment’s notice. Toss in a cameo from Danny DeVito or Judd Hirsch once in awhile and you’d have a real winner.
*photo courtesy of Dollar Photo Club