We’re a little bit past the very worst of a mostly awful trend, where studio-owned streamers desperately rifle through back catalogues to find much-seen films they can needlessly contort into barely watched TV shows. Paramount did it with Fatal Attraction, American Gigolo and, shudder, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies; Warner gave us animated Gremlins and Aquaman shows, and Universal has tried with Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin and a pickup of Lionsgate’s The Continental: From the World of John Wick. It was all boringly inevitable and predictably pointless, but mercifully, that pipeline has now slowed.
Instead, there have been more recent examples of it actually working, film-to-TV extensions with slightly more thought attached. Shows such as The Penguin, Alien: Earth, It: Welcome to Derry, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Ted have found ways to move beyond their source material and focus on the why rather than the just-because. Peacock’s gentle new take on The ’Burbs, a 1989 Tom Hanks comedy horror that slowly found cult classic status, isn’t exactly a necessary next step, but it’s a mostly harmless, decently engaging one that only really reveals its limitations at the very end.
