Back when Kevin Smith's Clerks first shook up indie cinema in 1994, there wasn't much of a place on TV for the film's high-conic duo, Jay and Silent Bob. (They did show up in 2000's Clerks: The Animated Series, but in far less offensive forms.) Here in 2018, though, there is a TV home for just about everything imaginable, and Kevin Smith is indeed working with Jay Mewes on a Jay and Silent Bob series for STX Entertainment. The really weird part? It'll be a virtual reality show.
Strange as it may seem, fans will get to enter Jay and Silent Bob's pop culture-savvy universe like never before, and it'll be from the relatively dialogue-free P.O.V. of Silent Bob himself. The untitled project will be both live-action and short-form, as not to overstay anyone's welcome, and Kevin Smith will be writing, directing and producing the episodes. No concrete plot details were given, but as the press release on Business Insider states, viewers can look forward to virtually hanging out with the weed-and-beer-loving Jay as the pair embarks on slacker-tastic adventures.
Part of me hopes that the entire VR experience is just standing in front of a brick wall outside of a convenience store. I mean, that'll definitely happen at some point during the series, because obviously. We'd also expect to see a few familiar faces from Smith's Askew-niverse flicks, though those names will probably be kept under wraps for now.
Kevin Smith's fans have been waiting patiently for the filmmaker to deliver a feature film return for Jay and Silent Bob, but this new gig might have to tide us over until they strike back on the big screen. Although we're still slightly wary about it all, since Smith's proposed Mallrats TV series fell through after months of small-scale hype. But this project does have the advantages of being short-form, with a limited cast, and outside of a major studio's iron grip, so there are less hurdles to jump over to reach completion. And we'll be leaping over those hurdles right along with Smith from within our VR helmets.
STX Entertainment, through their VR content banner STXsurreal, will be working on a host of other short-form VR series that were announced alongside the Jay and Silent Bob show. The Office's Ed Helms is producing a comedy about a Radio Shack employee who gets turned into a magical wizard. Guardians of the Galaxy star Dave Bautista will be working on an action-comedy project. Peter Berg has a paramilitary action-thriller called The Kiev Exchange. And finally, the John Wick films' writer Derek Kolstad has a currently untitled thriller centered around a mysterious aircraft crash in New Mexico in the '40s. We expect all of these to feature 100% fewer references to tonguing people's bungs.
There's no sign of when Kevin Smith's new Jay and Silent Bob project will hit...whatever services will end up offering it. But you can catch Kevin Smith popping up on The Flash for an episode he directed, which will air Tuesday, April 10, at 8:00 p.m. ET. To see all the other new and returning projects snootchie-bootching their way onto our TVs soon, head to our midseason premiere schedule and our summer premiere schedule.
