This just showed up in my email inbox.
I am estatic! I love McBain’s works, and if done right they would make an excellent series
Kudos to NBC and Ms. Hunter (McBain’s widow)
Don’t get too happy. This is TV we’re talking about, and Hollywood. There’s a 90% chance they’ll fuck it up somehow.
But good news anyway (potentially.) I like the books, and in the right hands they would be great TV.
The books are set in a fictional city that is very similar to New York. I wonder how that will work in a series setting. I know Batman as set in Gotham, but the entire thing is fantasy. Gritty realism in a fake city? Odd.
It worked with Hill Street Blues.
For a minute there, I thought they were going to spin off the Governator-doppelganger character from the Simpsons.
They’ll just set it in New York, like they did the series of 90s tv movies.And the 1961-2 tv series. Or Boston, which is where they set the movie version of Fuzz.
They keep trying and it never seems to work.
You are far too kind.
Wow, I remember those books. I used to burn through several a week from the library. Isola, right? Steve Carella and his deaf wife, page after page of nothing but dialog, a recurring villain called The Deaf Man?
In my mind, they are eternally set in the 70s and 80s – I’m sure I’ll experience some dissonance to see a present-day vibe. Sounds promising, though. Hope it exceeds expectations.
You’re missing a lot. The books were written from 1956 through 2005. Only 19 of the 55 were from the 70s and 80s. I’d argue that his best period was pre-1975, and there was a huge dropoff in quality after that time. He went from writing fantastic taut 150-book books to writing bloated 400-pagers with essentially the same amount of plot. That’s why you remember so much dialog. There are some fine books from the early 70s*, but you need to get the earlier ones. They have all been reprinted so they should be cheap and easy to find.
*Hail to the Chief is an astounding parable of Richard Nixon, but if you didn’t live through Nixon’s reign of terror, it won’t mean much to you.
Or Tokyo, like Akira Kurosawa did.
Absolutely agree.
One of the best things he did was advance the characters through time. Carella should be almost dead by now; he was a WWII vet, then he was a Korean vet, then a Vietnam vet, then a vet of the “war that every young American male has”. The social, criminal, and personal settings changed noticeably yet seamlessly as our country did.
He even managed to turn Fat Ollie into a regular human being toward the end.