In 2018, the highly anticipated Tremors television series with Kevin Bacon, who co-starred in the original film, was canceled. A trailer for the abandoned pilot made its way online not long after, but since then, audiences have heard next to nothing about what Bacon and co-creator Andrew Miller’s new take on the franchise would have entailed. That all changed at this weekend’s ATX Television Festival in Austin, where Bacon, Miller and the pilot’s cast screened the unseen episode and discussed what could have been.
Among other things, Bacon revealed to IndieWire that, despite the pilot’s current status, there was always a chance the Tremors series could still happen. “Stranger things have happened,” he said. “If someone wanted it, they could have it… You hear about these things: People get pushed out or canceled, and other networks pick things up.”
As for Bacon and Miller’s original plans for the show, it sounds like we’ve all missed out on something pretty great. “It’s pretty much the only character I’d ever played in a movie that I ever thought, ‘This would be a fun guy to check out 25 years later,’ just because he was a mess,” Bacon told the crowd, per Deadline. “Finding out what had happened to him post worms would be an interesting journey.”
Describing the first season as “[taking] place ever 72 hours,” Miller said, “The idea was that there’s this incredible character who was a nobody in this tiny town, and the idea seemed so fun to thrust him on the national stage, to make this Kevin Bacon character a ’90s heartthrob, and then take it away.” He added that Bacon’s character, Valentine, “was someone who still imagined himself as that ’90s superstar, even though those days are long gone. We wanted to explore that through his relationship with his daughter, who resented him for not paying attention to the present and for being a drunk and lost in the past.”
The show would have also, as IndieWire pointed out, provided a timely commentary on pop culture’s current fascination with nostalgia. “I feel, to some degree, that nostalgia is like a drug and you get so high on it you don’t realize you’re screwed,” he said. “The more you fixate on the rearview mirror, the less likely you are to see the potholes you’re driving over.”
