Last year, Syfy pulled the plug on a Kevin Bacon-starring “Tremors” TV series, cancelling the planned series after the pilot episode had been filmed. Over the weekend, the failed “Tremors” project from writer/executive producer Andrew Miller had a special presentation at the ATX Television Festival in Austin, Texas, with a panel that included a selection of clips, a live script reading, and conversations with executive producers and cast, including Kevin Bacon, Andrew Miller, Jessica Rhoades, Toks Olagundoye, P.J. Byrne, Emily Tremaine and Haley Tju.
During the panel, Miller confirmed that the project is very much still dead in the water, while he and Bacon touched upon their plans for the series we’ll sadly never see.
“It’s pretty much the only character I’d ever played in a movie that I ever thought, ‘This would be a fun guy to check out 25 years later,’ just because he was a mess. Finding out what had happened to him post-worms would be an interesting journey,” said Bacon, as transcribed by Deadline.
Miller added, “The idea was to extend the mystery and chase after the monsters both above and below the ground. The idea was that there’s this incredible character who was a nobody in this tiny town, and the idea seemed so fun to thrust him on the national stage, to make this Kevin Bacon character a ’90s heartthrob, and then take it away. The notion was, ‘What if Perfection was the hottest town in the world for a minute, and then the Graboids don’t come back.’ Val was someone who still imagined himself as that ’90s superstar, even though those days are long gone. We wanted to explore that through his relationship with his daughter, who resented him for not paying attention to the present and for being a drunk and lost in the past.”
Miller also revealed that the first season was going to take place over the course of 72 hours, and that the series (not initially, at least) would not be touching upon the sequels.
“[We] wanted to make something that felt like it was directly from the first movie without getting into the sequels,” he explained. “At least, for the time being, we wanted to leave those characters behind and grow up some of the characters [from the first film].”
Vincenzo Natali (Splice) was the director of the pilot episode.
The series was set to pick up 25 years after the killer Graboid worms nearly destroyed the Nevada town of Perfection.
Bacon was to again play Valentine McKee, who beat the sandworms once and would attempt to do it again; but first he’d have to deal with age, alcohol and a delusional hero complex.
