Trailer of the Month

Saturday, July 12, 2014

REWIND - No go

The other day I fell into the youtube black hole--you know the one? Where you go on youtube to watch a certain video then get fascinated by one or more of the videos on the side and that leads to another then another and soon you've spent like three hours on youtube and have no idea how that happen? Yup, that black hole.

Anyways, I went on to find a trailer for a movie called BIG GAY LOVE - it has that guy who played Zander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in it so that equals hilarious. Then suddenly more movie previews popped up at the side and I clicked and clicked until I crashed into a full episode (and apparently the only episode) of a tv show that was made for SyFy called REWIND. The premise behind this show is as follows - and this is in my own words, okay?

Old guy loses wife, goes nuts, built a bomb, puts it in the middle of New York City, turned himself in, refuses to talk even through torture about how to disable bomb even during torture, ex-military guy goes on and tries to talk him out of blowing up the city, old crazy guy refuses, New York City and its 9 million residents went Kabloo-ey, military guy gets thrown into prison (still unsure of what charge they'd file against him), then military creates a time travel program....

The minute I started watching this show, I fall in love with the main characters - to add to my racing heart, the best friends are interracial and I am a HUGE fan of interracial friendships. But the whole scenario seemed eerily familiar. Then ten minutes in and it hit me - HA! SEVEN DAYS! Seven Days starring Jonathon LaPaglia, Don Franklin and a few others. This show was basically about a secret government program called Project Backstep, where they send Jonathan's character, Frank Parker, back seven days to stop a major catastrophe that happened in present time. It lasted from 1998 - 2001 and was a major success.

REWIND is a similar show but it only lasted one episode - from what I could see before it was dropped.

I think the major issue with this is that there is not much creativity in television these days. Think about it--most of the successful shows on tv are so called reality shows--Big Brother, Survivor (that's been on for like 20 seasons now), Bachelor/Bachelorette, Wipeout, American Ninja Warrior and the list goes on and on--not much writing or creativity required.

So when people get tasked with finding new actual show that requires writers and researchers someone screws the pooch by getting and thinking brilliant! Let's do that! without actually going in and looking to make sure the idea wasn't actually out there already. And repeating an idea isn't bad--but you have to go in with the idea this was done before so how do you make it better?

Either way, this show did not make it past pilot - The acting wasn't all that bad and the premise was solid, they just shouldn't have assumed no one remembered Seven Days.

Kato