Breathe easy, campers. It looks like a TV take on Friday the 13th won’t be coming to a CW affiliate near you after all. The news may be a bummer for fans of the franchise, but it does have the silver lining of Jason Voorhees enjoying the free time to see all the ways Manhattan has changed since he was there last.
Entertainment Weekly reports that the network’s planned Friday the 13th TV spinoff (tentatively titled Crystal Lake Chronicles) won’t be picked up as a series. CW president Mark Pedowitz didn’t exactly pull punches when he summed up the reasoning for ultimately passing on the project.
“We had better pilots,” explained CW president Mark Pedowitz to the Television Critics Association’s press tour in Beverly Hills on Thursday. “The bottom line is we felt we had stronger things to go with, and we didn’t go forward with it. 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.”
B-b-but it could have occurred in space like Jason X prophesied! Oh well. Crystal Lake Chronicles wasn’t the only TV adaptation getting a “thanks, but no thanks” from America’s favorite DC hero houser. The CW also passed on a none-more-gritty (OH THE GRIT!) TV take on Louisa May Alcott’s literary classic Little Women. Pedowitz told TCA attendees that “the script just couldn’t get there.”
If things don’t pan out for The CW’s upcoming crop of shows, maybe they can just combine the Friday the 13th and Little Women into one maddening blend of a program. Make it happen, network brass!
(Via Entertainment Weekly & AV Club)
