Reality Bites - Ben Stiller and Screenwriter Adapting Film For NBC

[Sawyer]

http://www.deadline.com/2013/08/reality-bites-tv-series-nbc-ben-stiller/

Ben Stiller & Helen Childress To Revive ‘Reality Bites’ As Comedy Series For NBC
By NELLIE ANDREEVA

Reality Bites NBC TV SeriesReality Bites, the cult 1994 romantic comedy that examined the angst of Generation X college graduates, is heading to primetime. The film’s director Ben Stiller and writer Helen Childress have teamed for a TV series version of the movie that starred Winona Ryder, Stiller and Ethan Hawke. Childress will write the single-camera comedy project, which is set up at NBC. It centers on recent college graduate Lelaina Pierce, the character played in the movie by Ryder, as she struggles to make her way — romantically and professionally — in the recession-plagued, pre-Internet early 1990s. Set in Houston, the show, and Lelaina herself with her video camera, chronicles the lives of her “slacker” friends with whom she shares an apartment. The series is produced by Universal Television, sibling to the film’s producer Universal Pictures. Co-producing with Uni TV are Stiller’s Red Hour Television and Double Feature Films, the company run by Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, who were producers on the 1994 film. Red Hours’ Stiller, Debbie Liebling, and Stuart Cornfeld executive produce with Childress, Shamberg and Sher. WME-repped Red Hour has a pilot, Big Time In Hollywood, FL, and stand-up comedy series, The Meltdown With Jonah And Kumail, at Comedy Central and sketch comedy series The Birthday Boys at IFC. Childress, repped by Original Artists, has feature horror project The Mountain at Fox and Red Hour with Stiller attached to direct, she is penning a feature adaptation of kids book The Snowy Day, also for Fox and Red Hour, and recently re-wrote The Drowning for Fox.

A Film-to-TV adaptation on NBC, without Jason Katims involved?

Nice try, NBC.

 

[Maximus One]

Watch this be a hit. It'll be like That 90's Show and people will eat that **** up

 

[Sawyer]

It does have the two decade difference going for it...

Happy Days - Set in the '50s, started in the '70s
That 70's Show - Set in the '70s, started in the '90s

This could work...

 

[Pink Ranger]

Perhaps I lack objectivity as a Gen Xer myself, but I'm not sure what the market is going to be for this show. The cachet of the 1990s; I just don't see it. The US economy is actually much, much worse now that it was in the 1990s recession. There aren't a lot of hilariously anachronistic fashions from that era (a millenial watching this show will see today's emo or punk fashions as 90s fashions). The only source of period-based humour is the limitations of technology, and to be frank computers don't always make the best plot devices, and the giant cellphone joke can basically be used once.

 

[Maximus One]

Dude, what the hell are you talking about? The 90s are ripe for this sort of thing. Like for real, so much stuff was going on in the 90s even with out the Internet and cell phones.

 

[Pink Ranger]

There just isn't the camp value there, that's what I'm trying to say. The 90s were very depressing, there isn't a lot to mine for comedy.