‘ Big’ thinks small ( screen)
They growup so fast. “Big,” the1988 comedy starring Tom Hanks as a boy in the body of a 30- yearold man, is just a fewyears shy of that benchmark age itself. Now comes news that the film has achieved its own mark of maturity: a half- hourTVseries, which is being developed by Fox.
For many observers, the “Big” adaptation will represent the latest instance of Hollywood cannibalizing existing intellectual property to capitalize on an audience’s familiarity with a title. They wouldn’t be wrong. That said, the notion of relocating what is perhaps the quintessential man- child comedy to a contemporary setting has some intriguing cultural implications.
The adaptation comes courtesy of Kevin Biegel and Mike Royce, whoworked together on the short- lived military sitcom “Enlisted,” about young men similarly struggling to adulthood. As Royce told Syracuse. com, the new show will tackle “what it means to be an adult and what it means to be a kid, and how today those two things are more confused than ever.”
Onscreen and off, we’ve been living in a sort of golden age of man- children for a number of years now.
Themovies of Judd Apatow, Todd Phillips, Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen offer allegedly grown- up male characters who still act like children or teenagers. They goof off with their buddies, crack raunchy jokes, smoke pot and play video games nonstop, and they’re generally clueless when it comes to careers and relationships.
“Big” takes a slightly different tack— it’s not about amanwho behaves like a child but a child pretending to be a man. Hanks’ character, Josh Baskin, has wished upon an antique fortune-tellingmachine that hewas “big” to impress a girl, and the wish comes true.
It takes more than a hooky concept or popular source material tomake the jump from big to small screen. “About A Boy” migrated from film to TV over similar man- child ground, to mixed results.
“Big” would be wise to bear in mind that successful film- to- TV adaptations— from “MASH” to “Fargo” to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — deepen the characters and expand the story without sacrificing something vital in the original ( unlike, say, the defanged “Bad Teacher”).
Pulling that off, though, is more than mere child’s play.