Twelve Monkeys TV adaptation is in YOUR FUTURE
Looks like Syfy has ordered a “cast-contingent” hour-long pilot for an adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, with an eye to make it into a proper TV series. One of the producers of Gilliam’s 1995 film is on board, and Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett, who both worked on Terra Nova and Nikita, wrote it. The model here is Battlestar Galactica: a movie reboot that could be a mini-series that could be multiple seasons.
Syfy’s Mark Stern talked about it with The Hollywood Reporter, back when the pilot was 90 minutes long and still waiting to be approved for production while the network and producers figured out what the whole series would be about:
It’s a return to our roots in terms of science fiction: cool, interesting push-the-genre science fiction. Some we’re looking at doing straight to series, because you really want to give them the flexibility and do a closed-ended, arced run. Some of them are going to be traditional pilots, and then we’ll decide and they may be a bit more episodic.
Given the time-travel theme, the fact that the source material (both Twelve Monkeys and La Jetée) are well-known, and the way TV’s changed over the last ten years with jigsaw-puzzle series like LOST and the revived Arrested Development, I’m curious to see if the showrunners might mess around with the timelines a bit, jumping around, giving the audience previews of things the story doesn’t explain right away, and generally making Doctor Who look like it’s for precocious kids (which, really, it kinda is).
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