Kevin Smith has apparently caught the TV bug. We’ve already reported on his efforts to turn ’80s cult movie The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai into a TV show, complete with a hoped-for Peter Weller cameo and an absolute refusal to explain the watermelon. (According to Smith’s Twitter, efforts to get the series on the air are going pretty well.) Now, the writer and director has announced that he’s turning the long-in-the-works Mallrats 2 into a TV series, too.
Smith made the announcement on Philadelphia’s 93.3 radio station, where he’d stopped by to promote his very weird “his-and-Johnny-Depp’s-daughters-fight-sausage-men” movie, Yoga Hosers. Smith declared that the Mallrats series would run for 10 episodes, presumably still set in that Pennsylvania mall he was so excited to find last year.
“It is happening,” Smith told his interviewers. “It’s taking us a longer time to build it, but what we did was reconfigured it. You know, Mallrats is a 20 year old movie, and the idea of sequelizing a 20-year-old movie to some people is like, ‘Why would you bother? It wasn’t successful the first time. What’d you guys make?’ We’re like, ‘Two million?’ ‘Alright, well, I don’t know if the world is screaming out for this.’ However, I went and directed an episode of The Flash, and when I went up there, it was kind of a weird game changer for my career. I felt at home in the medium.”
This isn’t the first time Smith has tried to adapt his own work for the small screen. Back in 2000, Clerks: The Animated Series ran for two whole episodes before ABC pulled it from the schedule, inviting a lot of questions about the suitability of Smith’s writing for TV, and also about who is driving. (For the record, Bear is driving, how can that be?) Smith has been talking about a Mallrats sequel for years now, but it remains to be seen whether his recently won TV-director clout will finally let him launch the project at last, to glide across the airwaves like a beautiful sailboat which may or may not be there.