Josh Schwartz Strikes Again
Josh Schwartz is adapting Misfits for American television. I found out because the internet won’t shut up about it, and because this is how it works: something brilliant comes from elsewhere, gets noticed, and someone at a studio thinks they should fix it.
I watched The O.C. back when I was into that kind of thing. Schwartz made it, and it had something for a moment. But I burned out fast. Too much of everything—the wealth, the production design, the sense that you’re supposed to feel a certain way because the show is trying so hard to make you feel it. Gossip Girl was the same formula. Beautiful people problems. I got bored.
Misfits is different. It’s British, which means it doesn’t care if you’re watching. It’s mean and horny and stupid and about teenagers who get superpowers and then have to figure out what that means in real life. Real—meaning messy and ugly and full of sex and drugs and bad decisions. The show doesn’t apologize. Someone runs naked through the streets because his family threw him out, and that’s just what happens.
And now Schwartz is going to fix that.
American television has a law: if something brilliant comes from elsewhere, we have to fix it. Import something that doesn’t need fixing and watch it become exactly what it was running from. Call it localization. Call it adaptation. It’s still erasure with a network budget.
MTV did this with Skins. They took it and immediately softened it. Cut the actual sex scenes, toned down the language, made dysfunction look acceptable. One season and then canceled because everyone could tell what was missing. American Skins wasn’t that show anymore. It was an apology in episodic form.
I’m hoping Schwartz gets distracted. That the option lapses. That someone remembers Skins lasted one season. Probably not. Probably in a few years there’ll be an American Misfits that’s perfectly competent, for exactly the people it’s aimed at, and nobody will think twice about what got lost. The original will still be there if you know where to look.