TV
“Tales From the Crypt” Rights Issues a Complicated “Nightmare”
The “twist” ending is that we’ll probably never see “Tales From the Crypt” back on television (I’m fine with this so long as I get the HBO episodes in HD one of these days).
Last year, TNT told Bloody Disgusting that rights issues have delayed their “Tales From the Crypt” revival, which was to be part of an M. Night Shyamalan curated horror block. In August 2016 TNT president Kevin Reilly said to expect the show in the fourth quarter of 2017. After small optimism, Reilly told Deadline back in June that they’re moving on from the project and instead focusing on Ridley Scott’s new anthology series.
“That one got really caught up in a complete legal mess unfortunately with a very complicated underlying rights structure,” he had explained. “We lost so much time, so I said, ‘Look, I’m not waiting around four years for this thing’. Maybe that will come back around…”
Reilly had more to say today, explaining that they wouldn’t have even announced the project had they known how complicated and screwed up the rights were.
“It’s been fun with lawyers, it’s been really fun,” Reilly sarcastically stated. “We did not know from the get-go or else we would not have announced it and made a big deal out of it. But in fact, there were rights. It is among the most — if not the most — complicated rights structure I’ve ever seen in my career, and we had no idea as we got into it. It became a nightmare. So we said, ‘Fine.’ If and when this gets cleaned up, we’ll revisit.”
“Tales From the Crypt” – part of TNT’s planned Horror Block, which was to also include “Time of Death” and “Creatures” – was greenlit back in April 2016 as they were ramping up an initial 10-episode order of the anthology series that would have reinvented the Crypt Keeper, based on the original EC Comics.
The project was announced as a new block of terror and suspense that was to be curated by Shyamalan, the Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable, and executive producer of the the Fox series “Wayward Pines.”
The block was said to feature both short and long-form storytelling, led by the “Tales From the Crypt” anthology series, executive-produced by Shyamalan, his partner at Blinding Edge Pictures, Ashwin Rajan; Endgame’s James Stern; and Aloris Entertainment’s John Santilli and Dan McKinnon.
After premiering last month, Netflix has cancelled supernatural mystery series “The Boroughs,” THR reports today.
The eight-episode show was created by showrunners Jeffrey Addiss & Will Matthews (“The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance”) and premiered on May 21.
The series logline reads, “In a seemingly picturesque retirement community in the New Mexico desert, a group of unlikely heroes must band together to stop an otherworldly threat from stealing the one thing they don’t have… time.”
Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, Bill Pullman, Carlos Miranda, Jena Malone, Seth Numrich, and Alice Kremelberg starred in the series.
The cast also featured Ed Begley Jr., Dee Wallace, Eric Edelstein, Rafael Casal, Mousa Hussein Kraish, Beth Bailey, Karan Soni, and Jane Kaczmarek.
Ben Taylor (“Sex Education”) directed the first two episodes, with Augustine Frizzell (“Euphoria”) and Kyle Patrick Alvarez (The Stanford Prison Experiment) also helming episodes.
Our own Daniel Kurland wrote in his season one review, “Outside of its heartfelt performances and brief flashes of inspiration, The Boroughs is unfortunately as forgettable as the very people who have been shipped off to its community.“
“The Boroughs” may not have seen the same level of success as “Stranger Things“, but it has remained a fixture in Netflix’s Top Ten ranking since its premiere.
The series’ cancellation after only one season is largely attributed to the series’ expensive sci-fi budget, and the fact that Executive Producers The Duffer Brothers (“Stranger Things”) are leaving Netflix for Paramount, where they’ll next tackle an untitled event film expected in 2028.
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