CBS’s “Rush Hour” premieres on TV this week, 18 years after the first film in the series was a box office success. The show follows a big film-t0-TV trend this season that also includes “Limitless” and “Supergirl.”
So how do these adaptations do? For the most part, not great. The longest-running film-based TV show of the last decade is NBC’s “Parenthood,” a show that is cherished by a relatively small audience. It ran for 103 beloved episodes.
An aside: To keep this digestible, we focused on just the past decade, and ignored shows like the Batman prequel “Gotham” that share characters with current film projects, but exist in different universes. (For example, the James Gordon of “Gotham” is Ben McKenzie, but the James Gordon of the upcoming “Justice League” film is JK Simmons.)
We included Marvel’s shows because their characters debuted on the big screen, and inhabit the same universe as the film characters.
At times, we made some judgment calls about what constitutes a film-to-TV adaptation. “The Odd Couple,” for example, was a play, then a film, then a television series, and now a TV show again. That one made us throw up our hands, and we included it.
The chart below shows how many episodes resulted from each film adaptation. The dark shading counts episodes that have already aired; the lighter end includes episodes that haven’t aired yet, but were ordered by networks.
Got your popcorn? Here we go:
