In a television landscape littered with remakes, spinoffs, and origin stories, From Dusk till Dawn: The Series might be the single oddest adaptation I’ve seen so far. Unlike something like Hannibal or Game of Thrones, From Dusk till Dawn‘s source material doesn’t lend itself to dramatic television structure: save for the opening salvo and the nuclear final half hour, there isn’t a lot going on in From Dusk till Dawn; the cast is small, and the script relies on the weird relationship between the Gecko brothers to keep things moving until they reach El Rey, the fateful bar somewhere around the border between America and Mexico. It’s really two films; a convict caper, and a ridiculously bloody (and often hilariously cheap) Aztec-flavored vampire film – so how does one turn that into a television show?
Better question: why turn it into a television show at all?
Unfortunately, despite some terrific, camp-tinged performances, From Dusk till Dawn: The Series‘s first episode feels like a series of reference points to the film, expanding on the small set of characters introduced in the first ten minutes of the film (which features a sheriff, convenience store owner, and a memorable bullet through the hand), with a slick sheen of high-definition production values thrown on top. That’s not to say its bad, or unpleasant to watch; the slow devolution into chaos around the little convenience store is a tightly-written, supernatural-tinged little caper, a classic bottle western scenario packed with wink, wink genre tropes and plenty of allusions to the later events of the film.
But I’m still missing the point of all this: while it’s entertaining, we all know how this story ends. Centered around two murderous psychopaths, what else is this show going to do while it stretches a two-hour story over ten hours? One of the most enjoyable things about From Dusk till Dawn (besides George Clooney, Juliette Lewis, and Harvey Keitel, of course) is Tarantino’s economical script; it never feels like the film is trying to convince us there’s something interesting to watch here – it allows the characters and their actions to speak for themselves, never taking itself too seriously. But From Dusk till Dawn is serious: there are allusions to Hell, demons, Latino drug kings (Wilder Valderrama lives!), and cops abandoning their values for revenge.
It’s trying so hard to convince us there’s a deep, relevant story here (an opening scene featuring a human sacrifice to snakes, by a couple of ancient natives of some sort), but all it really has to add is supernatural elements: instead of Richie being a fucking lunatic, he’s driven by visions of things he sees and understands, but nobody else does (no word on whether the foot fetish will translate to the small screen, however). We see Satanico Pandemonium whispering in his ear near the end of the pilot, of course, which already ruins the impact Salma Hayek’s appearance has on the film, the literal turning point where the audience is lured into El Rey along with the Geckos and their reluctant companions (speaking symbolically of the first half of the film, which establishes a specific reality, only to smash it to pieces in ludicrous fashion). The pilot attempts to make all of this interesting through allusion to the supernatural and trippy visuals, but it really only exposes how thin and small the scope of this show really is.
What’s frustrating is that I mostly liked the pilot – Don Johnson is fucking terrific, and D.J. Cotrona is able to separate his Seth from Clooney’s, thanks to the script revealing just how much of a farce his cool, collected persona through the events of the film really were. He’s not as confident a man as he seems; but unlike his brother, Seth can channel his fear into confidence (but then again, he can’t see what Richie sees), which gives a duality to the character we didn’t see in the film. But this is a small ripple in the gorgeously-shot, emotionally-hollow pilot of From Dusk till Dawn; a series that really can’t define why it exists, beyond an addendum to a cult film manipulated into a launching pad for a network.
