'Stay Tuned' TV Series In The Works; Will Adapt The Film About A Couple Who Gets Sucked Into Their TV
Stay Tuned, a 1992 movie in which John Ritter and Pam Dawber play a husband and wife who get sucked into their television and inhabit different worlds as they bounce through the TV's hellish programming, is being adapted into a TV show.
Just two months ago, I wrote a piece proclaiming that this goofy little quasi-forgotten movie was an ideal candidate for a modern remake. Am I to believe it's a coincidence that a new version is now in the works? Or do the people behind this Stay Tuned TV series read /Film? Hopefully my check is in the mail. Get the details about the new show below.
Deadline reports that Ian Goldberg, one of the co-showrunners of Fear the Walking Dead, is developing this Stay Tuned TV series alongside FTWD writer/producer Richard Naing, and the two of them will write the show. Some of you may know them better as the guys who wrote the 2016 horror movie The Autopsy of Jane Doe.
The '92 film version of Stay Tuned was about a TV-obsessed man named Roy, who valued watching TV more than spending time with his wife Helen. A secret emissary from the devil (!) shows up on Roy's doorstep and offers him a brand new big screen TV, which he accepts – only for Roy and Helen to get sucked into the screen and find themselves in the middle of a convoluted piece of entertainment for the devil himself. The premise: if the humans survive for 24 hours, they'll be released back into the real world. But first, they'll be forced to travel through the worlds of then-modern popular culture, all with dangerous, hellacious twists: Northern Overexposure, Driving Over Miss Daisy, Three Men and Rosemary's Baby, etc. Here's a trailer:
The thing that impressed me the most about the film (which is very cheesy, by the way) was the way it created tons of worlds and got a huge bang for its buck in terms of the premise. It wasn't just three or four little worlds – the characters were changing costumes and dropped into wholly new environments every few minutes, and a TV series, with a longer time to tell the story, could have lots of fun cycling through different channels and shows. The big question, of course, is if they'll be able to tap into any recognizable properties from this era, or if, for example, the characters will simply visit a generic fantasy world instead of something more specific, like Westeros.
The project is being developed at AMC Studios, where Goldberg has an overall deal. Morgan Creek Entertainment, the company behind the original movie, is producing this version, which is one of the many projects from its film library that it's trying to revive.