NBC’s Munsters reboot Mockingbird Lane to capitalize on the Universal Monsters characters

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

NBC and Bryan Fuller’s MOCKINGBIRD LANE, a reboot of The Munsters, won’t premiere until 2013, but it already is looking to capitalize on Universal’s vault of classic monster characters.

The series cast already includes Eddie Izzard as Grandpa, Jerry O’Connell as Herman Munster, and Portia de Rossi as Lilly Munster. As you can see in the blurry Comic Con cast photo above, the characters will all have a much more human appearance in the new series. But, Fuller promises the show will keep the original’s humor although in a “darker and edgier” format.

So, how dark is darker? According to Fuller “The Munsters actually do what monsters do. They eat people and they have to live with the ramifications of being monstrous. It’s like grounding it in a reality because the half-hour was a sitcom, we saw the monsters: they were monsters on the outside and weren’t monsters on the inside. For us, they’re monsters outside and inside, and we get to double our story.”

Sounds good to me. Fuller also says “Everything is a metaphor for something that you can identify with in a relationship. The fact that Herman is in a constant state of decay and he’s married to someone who doesn’t age. We get to play with all those insecurities. The fact that he was made by his father-in-law and then has to live up to those standards; he’s always trying to find his own identity.”

Fuller created the short lived shows WONDERFALLS and PUSHING DAISIES, which were both cancelled way too soon. NBC desperately needs a hit show and they will follow a technique used by ABC’s biggest hit from last season to try and get big ratings. “‘Once Upon a Time’ has fairy tales,” he says, “We have universal monsters, which for me are the fairy tales of my youth. That’s where I grew up, loving The Munsters, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Metaluna monster from ‘Silent Earth’ and the Mole People. I would love to rope in all of those characters from those stories, as well as get the Cat People and get those types of things.”

What do you think of bringing back The Munsters for a darker series?