Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

Um, okay. They're going to make a Crash TV Series.

Los Angeles, CA (AHN) – The Oscar winning racial drama “Crash” will be adapted for the small screen and appear on nationwide television next year.

The film version starred Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle and won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in March.

Producer Cathy Schulman says, "I hope it will air in the next year. The actors from the film will show up. Don Cheadle is a producer and will also be on at least a few episodes. We'll see about everyone else."

Let me go on the record here as saying I think this is a terrible idea, and not merely because I didn't enjoy the movie.

I've softened on the film considerably, not because I've changed my own personal opinion of it, but just in realizing that it's all about disagreement on a matter of taste, rather than any kind of objective quality. So it's not that it was a bad film, or that it "sucked", only that, personally, I really didn't like it.

My guess then, is that I wouldn't like the show either. But even if I had enjoyed the film, I would still think a TV Series spinoff is a bad idea if only because the nature of a TV series and of a film are very different. The film was a message-piece, about the capacity for racism in all of us, and how the interactions among people can surprise us with the same person acting as both victim and aggressor in the same day.

That's just not going to transfer well to an ongoing series, which needs to be about character, not concept. A concept can be enough to make you watch a show once or twice, but you'll only stick around if you like the characters. The whole story in the film hung entirely on the coincidental and unexpected connections between all these characters. What are they going to do in a series? Are they going to all meet each other? On what basis?

A TV series develops based on the relationships between the characters, but the entire theme and plot of the film hinged on the characters not really knowing one another. That was the whole point! That you see someone on the street and have a brief interaction with them, and you make a snap judgement about them, a judgement that can have lasting impact on both of you. If you were to have the characters get to know each other better, it changes all of that.

The only way I could see it working (maybe) is by focusing on the cop characters, only because they are the most likely to interact with a lot of very diverse people (in both race and class) on a regular basis.

I'm not saying that it can't possibly be a good show, only that the film itself will not transfer well, and the only way it could be a good series would be to change it enough that calling it "Crash" will only be an attempt to draw an audience of people who liked the film.

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