Given
that we're living in the era of "The Jay Leno Show,"
when most major television networks are trying to trim back on
content and save a few bucks, the announcement a few weeks ago
from Syfy caught my eye instantly.
In addition to several of its new television series - chief
among them "Caprica," the prequel to "Battlestar
Galactica" - the network has announced an ambitious slate
of Saturday original movies, with each installment aiming to
reimagine a classic fairy tale, legend or pop culture
character.
Think of it as modernizing, or reconceiving, our favorite
fairy tale storylines. Hollywood does it all the time. Syfy
goes well beyond such comic book characters as Batman and
Superman, and toys with the plots of everything from
"Little Red Riding Hood" to "Hansel and Gretel."
It's an ambitious experiment; putting together these movies
is not cheap and airing prime new content on Saturday night
risks missing those people who are out for the evening.
But clearly Syfy believes that it has a core Saturday movie
audience, and the remainder of fans will catch it later via
TiVo or DVR, as well as during reruns and on DVD. It's a
multi-platform franchise, less interested in instant ratings
than in gradually racking up the eyeballs.
And it's all about creating new content; bringing something
new to the table. I, for one, am thrilled to see networks
focus less on reality TV and a little more on creating new
brands and identities. The more the better.
The first Saturday original movie airs this weekend,
beginning at 8 p.m. Saturday. It's called "Beauty and the
Beasts: A Dark Tale," and it spins the romanticized
Disney version into a campy, at times ugly, meditation on
power struggles for the throne and the way a beauty and a
beast can work together to go after a power-hungry witch. It's
a B-movie twist to an A-movie franchise.
Following in the footsteps of "Beauty and the
Beasts" in March will be "Red," a "Little
Red Riding Hood" spinoff that imagines a world in which
Red brings home a fiance to learn about her family's obsession
with killing werewolves.
Then there's "Hansel," which imagines a grown-up
boy now returning to the haunted forest 20 years after his
initial encounter to seek revenge against the witch.
"8th Voyage of Sinbad" pits Sinbad against a
mythical minotaur. "Aladdin" replaces a comical
genie with an evil one, and "Black Forest" gives us
naive tourists who wander into an enchanted forest only to
realize it's an evil trap they must fight their way out of.
Not all of these Syfy productions are up to the level of
Shakespeare, but it's fun to see a network trying something
new and having some fun with the premise in the process.
E-mail: snyderreviews@hotmail.com
