“All Of Me/Why not remake All Of Me?”
That’s the tune being sung at NBC today, where it’s been announced that the network will be taking the lips, the arms, and all the rest of Carl Reiner’s 1984 possession comedy All Of Me and throwing them in The Big Reboot Machine. According to Deadline, the new series is being pitched as a sort of anthology sitcom, with its body-swap-prone star getting hijacked each week by a different goal-oriented ghost. (Industry insiders refer to this as “A reverse Quantum Leap.”)
The remake is being put together by Betsy Thomas, the creator of TBS’s genial My Boys, a connection that mostly just makes us want to see Jim Gaffigan get inhabited by a ghost. The planned series is just the latest in a long string of movie remakes that’s been dominating network production schedules over the last few years, including Taken, Rush Hour, The Notebook, and the already-on-the-rocks Minority Report.
All Of Me at least has an intriguingly different take on the movie’s premise, but it’ll still have to deal with one of the major hurdles facing any remake of a big-budget film: Namely, that the original movie had the money and the pull to star Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin, two of the greatest comic actors of their time, and the pair’s chemistry making up the majority of the movie’s appeal. And although there are rumors that Martin might sign on to produce the series, it still seems as likely as not that—to paraphrase the old song—the whole thing might just be kind of a mess without them.