The limitations of adaptations
Bryan Fuller may just be the most cursed guys in television. Okay, so I can’t avow that fact with complete certainty; for all I know, there’s some young creative type out there who’s had a bunch of his pilots rejected over the years or some equally egregious fate. But it certainly does feel as if nobody in the business has had it harder than Fuller (and yes, that includes Joss Whedon). Though he has had three shows make it to air – Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daises – all three met unceremonious fates. Fuller was kicked off of Dead Like Me by MGM within five episodes, and the show was left to creatively waste away for another season and a half. Wonderfalls, thanks to some very quick and announced scheduling changes, was axed after the fourth episode. And Pushing Daises had a very truncated first season thanks to the 2007-08 Writer’s Strike, which caused the show’s numbers, which were merely solid, to drop down to cancellation worthy come season two. (The last three episodes ended up being burned off in June 2009.)
That ill luck continued with Fuller’s attempt to adapt The Amazing Screw-On Head, a one-shot comic book from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, for the small screen. The pilot was pitched to the Sci-Fi channel, and it was released on the channel’s website on July 2006, where it was left open to the channel’s viewers to vote on whether they would pick the show up. (Obviously it was not, and a DVD on the pilot was released in February 2007.) The pilot is essentially an exact retelling of the comic, only with some added character backstory. It features Screw-On Head (Paul Giamatti) and his manservant Mr. Groin (Patton Oswalt) going against his arch nemesis Emperor Zombie (David Hyde Pierce) and Head’s former lover, Patience (Molly Shannon), as they try to bring a malevolent demigod into existence.
(I apologize for embedding the pilot in three parts like this. I know it looks awkward and all that, but the Google Video version had a much lower video quality that the Youtube version did.)
If it weren’t for the on-screen credits, it might be a bit hard to believe that this pilot was developed by Fuller. It’s certainly funny, and it already has a great sense of mood, both hallmarks of Fuller’s past shows, but without having read the actual comic, it’s hard to tell what of that is Fuller’s doing and what was already existed in Mignola’s original pages. (Though this unofficial motion comic someone created based on the first half of the book does give some idea.) The voice cast is suitably fantastic, and they manage to traverse the very fast paced, back-and-forth dialogue with great ease. That quirky energy is also is a boon to the plot, which moves quickly from point to point without seeming as if the pilot is just trying to cram a whole bunch of things into 20 minutes.
But – and this is important – the pilot relies far too heavily on exposition, especially coming from someone with the level of television experience that Fuller has. Sure, just about every pilot suffers from this problem, but Fuller has been better than most as avoiding large scene of info-dump, and even we he had to resort to it, it’s usually covered with a nice thick coat of Fulleresque quirk.
But the first third or so of this pilot comes off as almost all exposition, with Head stopping the action not once, but TWICE in order to explain some character’s backstory. Not only is it awkward to hear Giamatti vomit out a mouthful of words, but it’s made even worse that everything else in the episode stops in order for him to do it. Nor is it really all that necessary, at least in terms of this episode, that we learn about Head’s connection to Zombie. That seed could be planted here, surely, but such reveal could wait till later, preferably in an episode where such a reveal would have a larger emotional payoff.
So the question still remains of why Fuller, when writing this script out, decided to include so much info dumping. Well, apart from any input that Mignola and/or Sci-Fi may have had, it seems that Fuller was possibly hindered by one of or any combination of three different factors:
The limited amount of source material: With only one issue of The Amazing Screw-On Head – indeed it seems as if Mignola never meant for there to be anymore, as if he was more interested in expressing the concept than anything else – there is very little material for Fuller to play with in the pilot. Most comic book adaptations can draw on a wide swath of source material, from comics to television shows to novelizations in order to determine their exact vision for that particular adaptation. (Just think about the differing Batman movies – both live action and animated – that have been made since the 80s, and you’ll get the general idea.) But even when an adaptation is the first for a particular book, the adapter(s) still have a wide range of issues to refer to, and they can see what various storytelling experiments have or haven’t worked over the years.
Fuller didn’t have that option. He had just one issue to play off of, and since it’s standard practice in Hollywood to base film and television adaptations off of at least one story from a book, it’s perfectly understandable that he would adapt the one story he had on hand. Plus considering that Fuller set out to create backstories for these characters, some of whom switched out characters from the comic, it make economical sense that he would use a story that he knew worked, just in case the backstories didn’t (which they don’t).
The format: Though this shouldn’t be the case, it must be accepted that cartoons, especially cartoons that function as comic-book adaptations, are never going to be taken as seriously as just about any other form of scripted television. Fuller may very well have been aware of this fact (as well as Sci-Fi’s target audience) when he set out to make this pilot. The story here is kept simple – it is based on a one-shot after all – and Fuller instead decided to focus on the tone, something that very well may have been the most defining element of the show going forward.
Both the half-hour running time and the procedural-ish nature of the pilot seems to imply that had the series been picked up, each episode would have followed roughly the same format – Head searches for villains and/or artifacts that pose a threat to America, and neutralizes each one in turn – which means the audience would more than likely be turning into the show for its characters and humor, not it’s unique stories. (Think of it like Castle or House.) In short, it seems as if Fuller was perhaps aiming for a Saturday morning cartoon format infused with some more adult-oriented humor, and that’s okay considering how entertaining it is, even if it does mean the stories get short-shifted. It’s not ideal, but it gets the job done.
Unpolished tone: Late in the pilot, when all of the characters are at the temple site and facing one another in some sort of weird Mexican Standoff, some of the exposition starts to creep back into their conversation, bringing with it a few new tidbits of information. It all comes fast and furious, and while this would serves as a poor choice of storytelling technique in most cases, here it’s all very funny, mostly because it seems to play off of and mock all of the exposition that came earlier.
I say “seems” because I can’t rightly tell if that was Fuller’s intention, and if that means he recognizes that the earlier exposition was clunky and shoehorned (or if the clunky exposition was done on purpose). As well as the mood is established in this pilot, mostly by the color scheme, the tone is a different story. As stated above, the story here moves rather briskly, and at some points the pace is almost too brisk, to the point of near anarchy. But was all this madcappery part of Fuller’s vision for the show? Well, without having read the comic – and with no other episodes or notes to refer to – it’s a bit difficult to determine. But based on this pilot, I could see how fast-paced, madcap storytelling could have been part of this show’s MO, where anarchic storytelling becomes part of the show’s humor. In fact if this were true, the pilot’s structure might just make a bit more sense, and with this is mind it might become better upon rewatch.
So should Head have been picked up for series? Certainly. The back 2/3 of the episode are classic Fuller, and even though it would mean slogging through those first 8 minutes of exposition, I can definitely see myself watching this pilot again. Despite the first act problems, the pilot quickly becomes highly entertaining, both in terms of action and humor, and those pluses practically make up for the clunky exposition, to the point where when you finish the pilot you have a much higher opinion of it then when you began. Moreover, the mood and the humor (and that possible madcap tone) proves that Fuller knew where he wanted this show to go in the future, and that it would always be entertaining, regardless of story was being told.
So then why was it never picked up? I hate to be so cynical about this, but I have to lay the blame at the feet of the regular Sci-Fi audience. This is a smart, funny show, and based on all the crappy made-for-TV movies that Sci-Fi airs, this certainly seems like it might go over the heads of the channel’s target audience. Yes, this pilot did go online between the second and third seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the only truly smart show Sci-Fi has ever produced, but I always got the feeling that most of that’s show’s audience only ever watched Sci-Fi for that show. (It’s almost as if Sci-Fi missed out on tapping into the BG audience by not making this pilot available sooner.) Yet while Head was never a good fit for the traditional Sci-Fi brand , I’m really not sure where this show would have been accepted, as weird as it is. Sure, some might say that it could have gone to FOX or Adult Swim, the two real powerhouses for animated series, but I’m doubt Head would have been edgy enough for them, and this show is so good already that making it edgier might ruin it.
The Amazing Screw-On Head may have been a bastard child of television, but I’m sure glad that somebody conceived it. It’s a smart, funny, well made piece of animation, and though it’s sad that will never get to see more of it, it’s certainly nice to know that somebody in the television industry was willing to take a risk on a something a little bit unconventional like this.
Next Week: We talk about the first of two pilots which gained fame on the internet with Nobody’s Watching, from Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence.
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