To follow-up on my earlier post about David Tennant starring in NBC’s awful sounding pilot Rex Is Not Your Lawyer, I would like to point out that Jeffrey Tambor has joined the cast. Per THR, Tambor will play “Rex’s psychiatrist, a specialist in anxiety disorders who himself suffers from them and who also becomes romantically involved with Rex’s mother.” Two bucks on Jean Smart as the mama.
Pilot Watch/Flup: Wackiness Doth Ensue & We’re Only Still Casting
Pilot Watch: Will Gattaca Miss the Point?
There was this ridiculously long article about Denis Leary’s post-Rescue Me plans in Variety two weeks ago. Buried down at the bottom was word that Leary’s production company has the rights to redevelop Gattaca as a TV series.
(Side rant: Did you miss that news? Don’t feel badly! Variety can’t spell. Apparently they missed that whole obvs part of the movie where the title was based off the four bases of DNA and stuff, hi, whatever. Spell things right, losers!)
I loved Gattaca. I refuse to explain the plot of the film because you should have seen it. And while I haven’t seen the movie in a while, I remember the following bits as being particularly interesting:
- the fantastic 40s/50s-modern set and costume design and general film noir feel
- nature - so to speak - vs. nurture
- Uma’s character’s self-loathing because she couldn’t perfect herself
- liberal eugenics rather than total government control: parents with financial means opt-in to the system, but the system is set up to favor those who opt-in
MTV published an interview with Gil Grant, who’s writing the Gattaca pilot for Leary’s Apostle Films. Grant is writing the pilot as a police procedural set in the future. Here’s how Grant got there:
[The NASA-ish space travel] facility was so specific, so narrow in its focus. It worked for [the movie’s] story, but if you open it up and go outside that world, you can see a broader canvas there,” Grant explained. The idea of a police procedural evolved naturally from there, both as a source of compelling weekly stories and as a portrait of the issues facing a society which has embraced eugenics.
Sure. Naturally. The only thing natural about turning any good concept into a procedural is that people are naturally lazy. But then you know my thoughts on procedurals.
Grant’s timeframe for his Gattaca pilot seems to be after the events of the movie. He says, “I came up with a world which is populated with Valids and Invalids, the same premise [as the movie], but taken into a police department where we’re… integrating, using the analogy of the ‘60s Civil Rights struggle.” He goes on:
Even though it’s technically illegal to discriminate against Invalids, just like in the ‘60s people did. So it’s come to pass that [the government has] ordered the police department to hire their first token Invalid into the detective department. What we’re doing is we’re taking an Invalid and teaming him up with a Valid, a seasoned officer. You know, it’s oil and water.
So it’s like if Elizabeth Mitchell had known Alan Tudyk was a Visitor and she had to be cool with it, and like, they went out on patrol and all, but she made occasional jokes about somebody needing some Lubriderm?
There were two crazy central conceits to Gattaca the movie that made it work and made audiences feel:
- Fear and looming threats of being found out that you weren’t perfect
- Ethan Hawke’s character’s dream of wanting to go to space embodied the sort of pure yearning quest that just about everyone can identify with, and his any means necessary approach makes him the underdog for whom you totes root instead of the underdog to whom you say meh.
Now, I’m not saying that the Gattaca TV series won’t figure out how to be good or interesting or even merely watchable, but - If the Invalids are already being accepted into society, where’s the tension? And if the show actually revolves around police officers, where’s the hope? It’s hard to see where this might go beyond a Season 3/4 Battlestar Galactica - and what looks to be every episode of V - old fashioned “hey gang, let’s smoke out the Others” witch hunt.
And frankly, if Gattaca wasn’t the property the Apostle Films guys were touching, I wouldn’t care. I do a great job of ignoring procedurals on a daily basis. But Gattaca was a really special moment in scifi, so don’t fuck it up, kids!
P.S. Grant has been a writer & producer for NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles & 24. So, um, at least there might be pithy one-note, one-line jokes and very, very hard perimeters.
Pilot Watch: We Do Not Want to See David Tennant Not Being Our Lawyer
David Tennant has, of course, left his role as the fucking awesome Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who to move onto brighter pastures, avoid typecasting, and to “bow out when it’s still fun.” Ok, sure. He won’t actually find a better part, but whatevs, I’ll go with his logic.
No matter what, an NBC pilot is not a brighter pasture. It was announced last week that Tennant will play the titular role in Rex Is Not Your Lawyer. Per the Hollywood Reporter, the pilot focuses on “a top Chicago litigator who begins suffering panic attacks and takes up coaching clients to represent themselves in court.” Words fail me, because mostly what comes to mind is “Gag.” And yet, somehow David E. Kelley is not to blame.
The rant:
- NBC has basically abandoned drama: see giving away 10:00pm, see just not airing Southland, see limply promoting and second-windowing Friday Night Lights, the only good show on this network. I mean, really, you can see how much television I get through in a week and the only NBC show on this list currently airs on Direct TV.
- The premise of Rex Is Not Your Lawyer blows, as does this freaking long title.
- Avoiding typecasting? Playing a guy with panic attacks certainly won’t resemble any sort of stammering characters that Tennant’s done before.
- Filming 22 episodes in 8 months when you’re used to filming 13 in that time frame will not, in any way, be fun.
The best possible outcome here is that Tennant gets a nice payday, even NBC decides they don’t want to watch this crap, and no pickup occurs.
