It's been a year since it was announced that Universal Cable Productions and Blumhouse Productions were teaming up to develop a television series that would be based on the 1990 creature feature TREMORS and would feature star Kevin Bacon's return to the franchise after he skipped the three sequels, the prequel, and the thirteen episode SciFi Channel series that have been made over the last couple decades. In that year, very little information has been shared about this Tremors project, and everything we do know about it has been casually dropped by Bacon: information like the fact that this will be a ten episode mini-series and that it's set up at Amazon.
Now someone else involved with the series has spoken up. The series' writer Andrew Miller was one of the screenwriters on a panel assembled for the recording of the 300th episode of the Nerdist podcast The Writers Panel, and during this recording Miller revealed that the mini-series is "about failure".
Bacon has said that his TREMORS character Valentine McKee is one of the only roles he has ever played that he is interested in reprising. He wants to see where this guy is 25 years after the events of the film. According to Miller, Val is still living in the small desert town of Perfection, Nevada, and things have not gone very well for him.
The Kevin Bacon character is now 25 years older, 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.
It's also a Donald Trump story in that it's 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.
People are trying to get over these traumas and both empower themselves and put themselves in great danger. I think we're not processing trauma as healthily right now as we could be. I find myself not processing trauma as well as I ought to be and feel like I'm the star of my own horror movie sometimes."
It seems like an interesting concept, the idea of Val feeling like the Graboid battle was the highlight of his life but then being confronted with how horrific it actually was when the Graboids return… And it also seems to answer the question of "Where was Val during the sequels?" Obviously he was living in a different timeline, because it doesn't sound like this mini-series will be acknowledging the events of the TREMORS movies and series that Bacon wasn't a part of.
Bacon's TREMORS co-star Michael Gross, who played Val's survivalist neighbor Burt Gummer and has gone on to star in every sequel, the prequel, and the first TV series, has said that no one has contacted him about appearing on this new show. That's a huge bummer, but while Bacon seems to be working on his own timeline Gross and Gummer are still going in theirs – Gross is set to star in TREMORS 6, for which he'll be re-teaming with TREMORS 5 co-star Jamie Kennedy and director Don Michael Paul. As Miller writes the mini-series, someone else is writing TREMORS 6.