MGM Television’s rebooted version of movie classic, In The Heat Of The Night, has found a home at Showtime, as the network will work with the studio to develop the TV series with The Help’s Tate Taylor at the helm.
The original 1967 movie arrived on the big screen during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Based on the 1965 novel, it starred Sidney Poitier, Warren Oates and Rod Steiger, and snagged five Academy Awards for its depiction of a divided Southern town. Poitier led the pic as a police detective sent to the fictional Mississippi town of Sparta to investigate a murder. He meets great hostility from the local sheriff, played by Steiger.
It’s a phenomenal film that sparked two sequels, but doesn’t exactly lend itself to the TV format. However, this approach has been tried before. In the late 80s NBC broadcasted a small screen version that later moved to CBS, until it was canceled after four seasons. That’s no small feat, so maybe there’s a juicy new angle that Taylor is hoping to take. So far, all we know on that front is that the show’s been described as “an exploration of character and race set in modern-day Mississippi.”
This will be the second TV development announced by Showtime in the last two days. Yesterday morning, news broke that the network would be broadcasting David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks revival series. In what’s becoming a fast-track trend, networks are turning more and more to popular movies of the past for development ideas. In The Heat Of The Night is a crime classic, that to be honest should be celebrated as is. It doesn’t require a reboot on the small screen, but that’s just my opinion. What do you think?