We’re only a few weeks into the fall TV season. No shows have even been canceled yet, but pilots for next year are already moving forward. Fox, in fact, has just signed on for a remake of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The network agreed to a put-pilot commitment for Frankenstein, which will come from a couple of prolific names. Longtime producers Rand Ravich and Howard Gordon have signed on to executive produce Frankenstein, and Ravich will even be writing the project.
Sort of like NBC’s failed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde series Do No Harm, Frankenstein will take a classic concept and rework it for the modern day. In Frankenstein, a man named Adam Tremble will die, only to be returned to the land of the living presumably by some creeptastic scientists. Excuse me, according to Deadline, they’ll actually prefer the term “creators.” The people behind Tremble’s return to the living will be a man who made billions on the Internet and his sister, who just so happens to be a bio-engineer.
Adam Tremble’s story thus far sounds a bit like RoboCop’s in terms of its law enforcement angle and it’s bio-engineering, but in some ways it will be completely the opposite. While RoboCop’s Alex Murphy is a good cop who turns bad briefly thanks to the bioengineering, Tremble’s trajectory will be that of a corrupt FBI agent who thinks twice about his former actions as he is confronted with bigger evils than what the FBI is used to dealing with. The premise is promising and nothing like Shelley’s Frankenstein. The pilot could be fun if it is executed correctly, although I am a little hesitant about getting too hopeful about a sci fi series headed to Fox. We all know how too many of those efforts have gone in the past.
Frankenstein’s a classic monster that has been done a bit to death in the movie world, but quite frankly, in a TV season that is chock full of TV pitches based on movies, I’ll take a reworked version of a story that came about in the 1800s. Hopefully, it will offer something a bit more enticing than the Big remake, the Bachelor Party remake and the Uncle Buck remake. At least this isn’t a full on I, Frankenstein reboot.
We’ll let you know if Frankenstein ends up moving forward at Fox. Until then, start thinking about other classic stories we could see rebooted. Maybe Dracula could work at a vet hospital. Elizabeth Bennet could play a modern day scientist trying to balance a career and find love. The possibilities are endless.
