When I posted about the upcoming Star Wars animated series last week, I forgot to mention one reason to be (guardedly) optimistic about the show. It’s just possible that, simply by virtue of forcing someone to write about the SW prequel characters for dozens of episodes, the series may put the kind of flesh on Amakin and company that George Lucas never managed to do in the actual movies.
There’s no guarantee that a TV version of a movie can improve on it, but often it does. The movie of Friday Night Lights (I never read the original book) was strong enough, but the series reaached an entirely different level of artistic achievement. I was never, admittedly, a big Terminator fan to begin with, but I care about the characters in Sarah Connor Chronicles more than I ever did their big-screen counterparts. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course, remains the turning-lead-into-gold standard. And who knows? TV might even be able to make a decent story out of Crash, whose interlocking-stories approach is all the rage on TV.
But there’s a lot more product out there in Hollywood. What’s your dream movie-to-TV-show adaptation?