So all our hopes crashed and burned because the right director took another job, and the wrong director got the gig.
PJ Hogan does seem to figure as the biggest fall guy in all the pilot post mortems. And I do have to say that I really liked Rob Bowman's work on the '91 series as well as on The X-Files. However, much of that work was almost ten years ago, and Bowman's latest project,
Elektra, the movie he left the pilot to work on, isn't exactly winning accolades - it's bombing at the boxoffice and has been almost universally panned, and panned big time by critics. Most reviews cite a disjointed script (that was apparently being constantly rewritten) as the movie's biggest fault, but many have also said that the actors' performances are much too uneven and the pacing is much too jumpy and does nothing to enhance the movie - and the responsibility for both of those aspects of any movie falls squarely on the shoulders of its director. I'd like to think that had Bowman stuck around things might have turned out differently with the pilot. But if his work on
Elektra is an indication, who knows?
Also, we have to keep in mind that the direction the pilot took didn't seem to be its only problem. Alec Newman remarked that "There was a lot of politics with it. ... I know there was stuff going on behind the scenes, as there always is, with network television, which was the new lesson for me. But as far as I'm concerned, if everybody was that unhappy with the situation around a pilot, just imagine the hell that it would have been to go to a series with it." And if that would have been the case, perhaps, as much as it pains us, it was best that this particular pilot didn't go to series. I've loved what little I've seen of it, but perhaps the pilot really just wasn't the right DS project at the right time...
