This article was republished on 10/24.
Netflix picked the perfect spooky month to debut Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, his swan song as he moves on from projects like this, The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass to go work at Amazon. Probably to make a Dark Tower series.
The Fall of the House of Usher stayed on top of Netflix’s top 10 chart for well over a week, and now has only been unseated today by a new, different sort of mystery show, Bodies, which has come out of relative nowhere to debut at #2 and now make it to #1.
Bodies is a science fiction show about a corpse that shows up at three distinct points in history in the same spot. The same corpse. That’s the central mystery and the show focuses on aspects of time travel that has drawn many comparisons to Netflix’s Dark, one of its best-ever series. This is not the same team, and the show is indeed in English. It stars very, very few people you’d recognize. I know the guy who played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire but that’s about it. I’ve only just started it, but it’s scoring decently well, and I’m curious enough to make it through the whole thing.
A new season of Big Mouth is here and at #3, now its seventh season as the show is massive sleeper hit for Netflix that feels like it will keep going forever. At #4 is “I Woke Up a Vampire,” a goofy Halloween-ish series for the younger crowd that I’m guessing probably could have been a movie.
Neon is a new music-based show that has debuted at #5. The Great British Baking Show, Beckham and Pact of Silence are older list entries that are sliding down. At the tail end of the list we have “Surviving Paradise,” a reality show where players fight to move from the wilderness to a luxury villa as Netflix tries to make its own Survivor, I guess. The last show is “Creature,” a Turkish series about a monster that I assume is not Frankenstein.
There’s really not much of anything to discuss here about renewals or shows desperate for more seasons. Bodies is a limited series. House of Usher is too and Flanagan is leaving. Big Mouth will live forever. I suppose I Woke Up a Vampire may want another season, but we probably wouldn’t see that until next Halloween. It does not have particularly good audience scores so I’m not sure how much hope it has unless viewership really skyrockets.
For now, I’m going to work on finishing Netflix’s Bodies and I will let you know what I think soon.
Update (10/24): If you were curious about Mike Flanagan’s potential next big move after The Fall of the House of Usher, we know he’s moving to Amazon, we know he wants to adapt The Dark Tower, and we know that Amazon owns the rights to The Dark Tower. Even though nothing has been announced, Flanagan has spoken openly about how he’d do it, if he did it. And it would not be like that one movie they made that everyone agreed to forget about.
Flanagan said that he would make the show five seasons of a TV show plus two movies, all of which would follow the other of the books. The first two episodes of Season 1 would be The Gunslinger, and the rest would be The Drawing of the Three. The show would then cover the first 7 books, culminating in The Wind Through the Keyhole being a film. It’s not clear what the other film would be.
If for some reason he can’t get the rights to Stephen King crossover characters like Father Callahan and Ted Brautigan, he’s sub in other King characters that were more accessible.
So, he has a plan. The Dark Tower has largely been thought of as practically unfilmable, and the most recent movie attempt only added to that, but if anyone can do it, it might be King superfan Flanagan using Amazon’s money. We’ll have to see.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Read the full article here
