Last August, former HitFix staffer Roth Cornet and I pondered the ways in which the CW's planned Friday the 13th TV series could potentially not suck. Turns out we needn't have bothered! At Thursday's Television Critics' Association, the network's president Mark Pedowitz revealed that the slasher spinoff series is as good as dead.
“The bottom line is we felt we had stronger things to go with, and we didn”t go forward with it,” said Pedowitz (via EW). “It was well-written, it was darker than we wanted it to be, and we didn”t believe it had sustainability … We didn”t believe that it was a sustainable script, a sustainable series. It was a very good pilot, but not a sustainable series.”
The show — under the working title of Crystal Lake Chronicles — would have taken a “meta” approach by setting the events in a world where the Friday the 13th movies were inspired by actual events. It was created by Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle (The Pretender).
Though the potential series has bitten the dust, F13 fans need not despair, as Jason Voorhees is destined to engage in more gratuitously-violent onscreen mayhem in the upcoming feature-film reboot set to be directed by The Crazies and The Last Witch Hunter helmer Breck Eisner. Which I have thoughts about, by the way.