Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the tearjerking, hugely-inventive 2004 classic in which Kate Winslet managed to give the most lived-in Manic Pixie Dream Girl performance of all time, is now becoming a TV series. As film-to-TV reboots go, this is one of the less-expected entries in that dubious canon.
Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine focused on a tortured couple (Winslet and Jim Carrey) who hire a company to erase their memories of one another. The film received two Academy Award nominations and scored one win, for Best Original Screenplay.
Eternal Sunshine is pure cinema, so in some ways it's hard to imagine a TV adaptation working. That said, Fargo — the acclaimed FX adaptation of the classic Coen Bros. film — proved that in this day and age, small-screen versions of big-screen stories can meet and even surpass their inspirations. And the talent involved isn't un-encouraging, with True Detective executive-producer Richard Brown and longtime Chuck scribe Zev Borow both currently attached. Which, okay, he's no Charlie Kaufman, but still.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the project is “in its early stages” and there is no network yet in the mix, though I don't doubt there's a home for this one at a cable network or even one of the streaming services like Netflix. If they do make this, here's hoping it won't end up on the dusty pile of failed TV reboots we'd just as soon have scrubbed from our minds.