What’s the best anthology currently on TV right now? Louie? Black Mirror (kinda, it’s over)? The Soup (think about it…)? Nothing from the horror genre really springs to mind, except for maybe Fear Itself, which has been off the air for at least 6 years now. Well good news then, because a Joe Hill-written pilot for a reboot of Tales From The Darkside just got picked up as a pilot for the CW. Woo! Woo, right?
The original series was co-created by George A. Romero and ran for five seasons from 1983 to 1988. It was pretty good. To be honest, the episode I remember most is one where Jerry Stiller turns into a goat monster (who looks like Ernest Borgnine at the end of The Devil’s Rain) while hosting a conservative call-in talk show.
I can’t imagine this remake is going show a lot of fidelity to the past. For one thing, the pilot is an hour-long, doubling the length of the original series’ episodes. Realistically, Tales From The Darkside is a great, grabby name that works outside of the context of brand recognition. It may mean something to Joe Hill or producers Bob Orci and Robert Kurtzman, but as a CW show with an audience being held over from The Originals or The Flash or whatever, this is basically going to be a brand new thing.
So we’ll see. If the show goes to series, we won’t see it until 2016 at the earliest. Hopefully Jerry Stiller will still be with us to make a cameo.