Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large That’s true for novelists as much as it is for screenwriters. Often those are one and the same — and because we live in an age where pre-sold IP usually makes it easier to sell a TV project, there have never been more series based on books than there are right now.
I don’t have the numbers to back me up on that, but we’re still living in peak TV times (well, according to John Landgraf, we’re winding down from that era, but it’s still here for now).
Which means that there have never been more series based on anything than there are right now. It’s easy to bemoan the predominance of intellectual property adaptations and remakes these days, yet I think we sometimes forget that it’s always been with us.
So many of the TV shows I grew up on were based on movies (“M*A*S*H,” “Alice,” “Fame”) or were spin-offs (“Laverne & Shirley,” “The Jeffersons,” “A Different World,” the list goes on).
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