Currently, the biggest trend in television seems to be the movie-to-tv adaptations. With Fox premiering its Minority Report series this upcoming Monday with CBS’s Limitless following the day after, networks are continually banking on building new programs around an already existing, and hopefully successful, brand.
Recently, NBC announced their plans to bring the Red story to the small screen and with action apparently fresh on the network’s minds, the Wrap is reporting on the their new direct-to-series order for a prequel series based on the Liam Neeson-starring Taken films. Universal Television is going in on the project with Luc Besson’s production company EuropaCorp which kinda sounds promising, because Luc Besson.
Prequel stories aren’t too prevalent when it comes to TV entertainment. However, Bates Motel has done a pretty great job at telling the story of young Norman Bates in its own semi-compelling manner outside of the canon of the Psycho movies. If NBC does it right, this may be the next craze in small-screen entertainment. It’s too soon to tell if the network really is on the right track, though, as the project has yet to be assigned a writer or showrunner and who knows if the story of a young Bryan Mills will be all that compelling.
Still, both Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day and William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A. are spinning off into their own series in the coming year and with the recent end of the network’s bloodiest series ever, it looks like NBC may be attempting a different approach at cutting edge story telling. Then again, we’ve seen the network’s own particular set of skills at work in the past and the success or failure of this project, at this point, all relies on our own collective speculation.
(Via The Wrap)
