From TV to Tinseltown

I was trying to watch The Dukes of Hazzard on DVD recently (for research purposes, obviously) when something important struck me on the noggin.

I realized I only have about 350,000 hours left in my life. Precious, dwindling moments. I can’t be spending my time watching a Hollywood remake of a TV show that barely caught my attention when I was a teenager. So I hit the "EJECT" button.

There are obvious reasons to skim through the DVD, of course, such as Jessica Simpson’s pink bikini romp, and the chance to hear Willie Nelson bark out lines like "I shoulda busted a cap in his ass" and "Lose three fingers in Korea, and this is the thanks I get…"

But that’s it, really. There’s no justifiable reason for sitting still for the duration of The Dukes of Hazzard, unless you’re really stoned, or really stupid.

And that’s the point, I think, behind all these Hollywood remakes of beloved TV shows from our pop cultural past: the makers are clearly either really stoned, or really stupid.

The trend hasn’t just infected TV product, of course. Studies show a full 80 to 85 percent of the "new" releases of Hollywood are either remakes (based on past films, books or TV shows) or sequels. This is what is known in Hollywood as "playing it safe." It’s a safe bet, the Tinseltown execs tell themselves, that people will watch something they have seen before, in some other form. People like repetition, don’t they?

This cynical view may explain why people stayed away from theaters in droves last year: maybe they finally realized that Hollywood was asking them to pay $10 a pop to watch things they used to catch on television for free. So now they just watch DVD movies in front of their TV sets at home. Which is poetic justice, in a way.

The list of rehashed TV dreck is endless, from the ‘70s cop shows (S.W.A.T., Mod Squad, Starsky & Hutch, Charlie’s Angels) to the live-action remakes of Saturday morning cartoons (never a good idea; see for example The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids, Dudley Do-Right, George of the Jungle, Inspector Gadget). Coming soon, a big-screen remake of Miami Vice with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, directed by Michael Mann, who started his illustrious career by directing…. um, Miami Vice episodes for TV.

Everything you kind of liked as a kid (or never actually experienced as a kid, but were made aware of through some process of cultural osmosis) is rapidly being turned into film, as if a part of your childhood needed to be exhumed, dusted off and given the ol’ Industrial Light and Magic treatment. From Westerns (Wild, Wild West; Maverick) to classic ’60s sitcoms (Bewitched, most recently), everything is suddenly ripe for "reimagining," usually with a wiseass, postmodern slant.

But as wide a gamut as the TV remakes may span, from science fiction to detective shows, there is one common denominator tying them all together. They all suck horribly.

(And for those of you who will protest that these movies are actually watchable, even funny and kind of entertaining, all I can say is, well, you really need to expand your horizons. Start by watching movies made before 2000.)

There are exceptions proving the rule, of course. Some of the earliest (and best) TV remakes managed to take a fresh look at their subject, turn two-dimensional characters into at least 2.5-dimensional characters, and deliver good acting, good direction and an entertaining filmic experience. Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) comes to mind. This rethink of the noir-ish Robert Stack "G-Man" show from the ’50s had Oscar-winning acting (from Sean Connery, anyway), memorable rip-offs of Battleship Potemkin by De Palma, and an effective score by Ennio Morricone.

Another entertaining TV reimagining was Charlie’s Angels (2000), which, though never quite capable of investing meaning in a ’70s show that was basically about hair and teeth, did feature some stylish over-the-top direction by "McG" (who did himself in with the way-over-the-top sequel), as well as some stylish booty-shaking by Cameron Diaz.

Josie and the Pussycats may have been a lame cartoon with lame music, but with a cast that included Alan Cumming, Parker Posey and Rosario Dawson, it was hard to totally dislike this 2001 live-action remake. And Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family (a TV show that was itself based on a comic strip) was a credible take on the ’60s monster-family-next-door genre, aided by gleeful performances from Raul Julia, Angelica Huston and a young Christina Ricci.

Most successful of the bunch was probably Harrison Ford in The Fugitive (1993), which lifted a cliffhanger TV show from the late ’60s into a great cat-and-mouse caper about a desperate search for "the man with one arm." Oscars again, and plenty of box office.

Which probably explains why Hollywood couldn’t resist cranking them out after that.

Here’s a partial list of the TV remakes you might have missed, because they generally tanked or went straight to DVD: The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best, Sergeant Bilko, McHale’s Navy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Lost in Space, I Spy, My Favorite Martian, The Avengers, Car 54, Where Are You?

Incidentally, The Avengers was a big-budget bomb with huge stars that should have worked, but didn’t. Maybe it’s because they stripped the witty, stylish ’60s spy show of any humor whatsoever to make way for action sequences. This highlights another problem with TV remakes: the tendency to overdress TV material with expensive special effects. Having said that, Uma Thurman was quite effective in her black catsuit. (As was Halle Berry in the otherwise crappy Batman spin-off from 2004, Catwoman.)

A big problem is the paltry material on which remakes are based. It’s hard to stretch a brainless TV show like The Dukes of Hazzard over 90 minutes, but Hollywood just keeps on trying. By casting an A-list bimbo (Simpson, whose acting, according to one film critic, "makes Madonna look like Dame Judi Dench") and featuring some "in-joke" cameos and Classic Southern Rock (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Bros., ZZ Top) on the soundtrack, the makers managed to pad out a plot that could barely fill 45 minutes on TV.

But that doesn’t make it watchable.

And that’s the crucial difference between remakes based on books and classic movies versus TV. While the recent Narnia film, King Kong or the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least had the opportunity to explore rich fictional worlds, and maybe even make them better in some ways, TV has but one direction to go: dumb, dumber, dumbest.

Thus movies like The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver have to rely on our collective memories of TV catchphrases, our shared cultural consciousness of canned laugh tracks and bad fashion. They just can’t go any deeper than that. There’s no "there" there.

Yes, TV is a wasteland, with a few bright exceptions. But it’s funny how the shows that were considered real breakthroughs in those seminal TV decades (All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Hill Street Blues) never get touched by Hollywood. Rather, it’s the cheap laugh, the lazy riff, the superficial pop reference that gets name-checked.

Oh, the hip young screenwriters try to inject some postmodern touches to even the most vacuous of projects (Starsky & Hutch riffed on the homoerotic subtext of the cop "buddy" shows, for example) but it’s clear that these beloved TV shows don’t stand up to much analysis.

Rather, the path of least resistance is to get some money-hungry Hollywood "legend" to sign on, as Robert De Niro inexplicably did for Rocky and Bullwinkle. (Does he cringe when he sees that title on his resume or on cable TV? Is there a project De Niro won’t say no to?)

Or they sign on some young director, preferably someone with a single name who’s directed "edgy" music videos. I’m sure it won’t be long before we see trailers for a Gilligan’s Island remake as directed by someone named "Kaos," for instance.

Don’t people deserve more for their money? Isn’t the moviegoing public entitled to movie titles that they can’t get for free on Nick at Nite? Don’t people work hard, and don’t they deserve something better for their chunk of change when they go to the local cineplex?

Or, as Willie Nelson might put it, "Lose three fingers in Korea, and this is the thanks I get?"