For more than a year and a half now, we've been following the rather slow progress of a television series based on the 1990 classic TREMORS that will see the return of Kevin Bacon to the role of his character Valentine McKee nearly thirty years later. During this time, we have learned that the show was being developed by Universal Cable Productions and Blumhouse Productions as a ten episode mini-series, and was set up at Amazon.
The series is being written by Andrew Miller, and while details are being kept secret Miller has said that the show catches up with Valentine McKee in the small town of Perfection, Nevada all these years after the events of TREMORS. According to Miller, Valentine is now
a horrible loser in this town that had a brief moment of glory in the '80s or '90s and is now worse off than it was before. The town is coming face to face with failure."
Miller's story deals with
the notion of nostalgia as a drug that's killing us and looking back on a time – the longer you look at that time in the mirror without accepting reality, these monsters start to grow beneath the surface. In this case it's these worms that are literally growing beneath the surface."
While at the Edinburgh International Film Festival recently, Bacon gave Screen Daily an update on the show's progress, revealing that it's switching networks. He said,
We are going to do a pilot for Syfy.
(Valentine is) the only character I’ve ever played that I was interested in exploring 25 years later. (TREMORS) is a really good movie. I don't go back and watch my movies but because we were doing this one, I had to go back and look at it. It's just the idea of this loser who is living a very ordinary life and has an extraordinary experience with these monsters and becomes, for a moment, a hero."
During this conversation, it was also revealed that the mini-series' episode count has been shortened from ten episodes to eight.
Syfy seems like a good home for the Tremors mini-series, especially given the fact that it was – back in its SciFi Channel days – also the home of a Tremors series that was primarily set in Perfection and starred franchise mainstay Michael Gross as his survivalist character Burt Gummer. Unfortunately, that series was cancelled after just one thirteen episode season.
Although Gross has been carrying the franchise for a couple decades now, it's not clear if he will be asked back for the Bacon mini-series. Gross is definitely back for TREMORS 6, which is set for a January 30, 2018 home video release.