Oh God. Brace yourselves. Three years after Crash inexplicably won Best Picture and enraged moviegoers and Oscar watchers worldwide, it’s like a bad rash that still won’t go away. Now, not content with just showing the damn thing over and over again, the Starz! network will turn Crash into a 13-episode TV series. That’s right: because there are just too many ways to explore racism in the most obvious and pandering way possible, we now get 13 mini-Crashes to make us all feel bad about ourselves but good for seeing a movie that addresses racism.
Variety reports that it will be the network’s first original drama series, and given that this is the idea they came up with, it’s not hard to see why. A number of cable networks, like AMC and TNT, have been expanding into original dramas with great success lately; it’s no shocker that Starz!, pretty much indistinguishable from HBO On Demand at this point, wants to move into that territory. And, OK, fine, Crash is an established property that performed quite well on home video, and its multi-layered storytelling format lends itself to a series expansion. Kevin Beggs, president of programming for Lionsgate, which will produce the series, said that none of the original characters from the movie will appear, but Don Cheadle will be working behind the camera, so there may be a possibility to see his character re-appear. Paul Haggis, the director and co-writer of the movie, will also be involved, along with his co-writer Bobby Moresco.
So they’re adapting an Oscar-winning movie for a TV series and getting the original talent involved as much as possible, and doing it on a premium cable network where you can pretty much get away with whatever you want. Fine. But why, God, why does it have to be Crash? Hollywood has no lack of self-congratulatory dramas, and most of them aren’t as intolerable as this one. We can now look forward to an episode each week in which a character confronts his racism and “learns something,” while any deeper lesson about character or relationships or anything not related to race get ignored as “unimportant.” Personally, I’m holding out for Shakespeare in Love: The Animated Series, or maybe Titanic: The Untold Story. Now that’s must-see TV.
