I was talking to some colleagues about the upcoming Get Smart movie, and I had to be honest. I don’t have very high hopes.

I was a big fan of the television series, and the movie will have a hard time living up to that. I think Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway are both good casting choices, both for talent and for box office appeal, but without the creative team from the series (Buck Henry, Mel Brooks), I worry that the movie might seem derivative.

It’s not easy to make a good movie from a television series, and it seems like Hollywood doesn’t even try anymore. They just want to hijack the brand identity of a vague, but pleasant memory to create another mediocre blockbuster. Look at all of the terrible TV show-based movies that have come out in the last ten years or so. But people recognize the name, and so they go to see the movie, expecting to relive their memories of watching those shows from long ago.

In some cases, television shows do make good movies. South Park made for a much better movie than anyone had a right to expect. But that was from the same creative team that did the show, so let’s put that aside for a moment. I did enjoy the first Mission: Impossible movie on its own terms, but as an action/adventure movie, not as a faithful adaptation of one of my favorite shows. If you hold it to that standard, the movie failed. The hero wasn’t even part of the original series. The villain was the hero of the original series. What’s up with that? I have to confess that I enjoyed the Brady Bunch Movie a great deal, but that was a parody, so I don’t know if we can count that.

It seems even more difficult to turn a movie into a successful TV series. Of course, M*A*S*H and The Odd Couple come to mind. I’ve never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve heard good things.

What makes a successful adaptation from television to movie? Should the goal be to reach out to established fans from a previous generation, or to redefine the essential elements of the original for an audience of a new age? Can a movie that has a beginning, middle, and end, really be extended into a television series without compromising its integrity? Or does the film remain immune to whatever experimentation happens on the small screen?

And some shows that I remember from childhood as being of very high quality are almost unwatchable to me now. If a film were to be made of one of those shows, it might be considered charitable to rework it.

But I digress. On to the Question of the Week:

What, in your opinion, have been successful crossovers between film and television (in either direction), and what lessons do these successes have to teach those who would follow?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under Anne Hathaway, Film, Question, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.