We need to come up with a new word for movies that become TV shows. It has to be a name that encompasses the whole idea of taking a two-hour story with a definite beginning, middle, and end, and then blowing it up so much that the middle and end don’t come for months or years. Here’s our pitch: Proceduralation, a portmanteau of “procedural” and “adaptation.” Most of these shows (Minority Report, Limitless) end up taking the basic premise of the movie and twisting it into a standard procedural structure, so this booming genre should just embrace our new word instead of the generic “adaptation” or the unwieldy “TV show based on a movie.”
Anyway, Deadline is reporting that NBC is developing a proceduralation of In The Line Of Fire, the 1993 Clint Eastwood/John Malkovich movie about a disgraced Secret Service agent who tries to redeem himself by thwarting an assassination attempt on the president. Naturally, the TV version will follow that same premise, but it’ll pad out the investigation into the assassin and his evil plot with other, unrelated cases. Or, as Deadline puts it, “the agent and his female partner will investigate cases while engaged simultaneously in a twisted cat-and-mouse with the would-be assassin.” Basically, if proceduralation were a real word, its definition would just be a description of this In The Line Of Fire TV show.