12 MONKEYS ARRIVES, HELIX RETURNS ON SYFY. IS THIS A GOOD THING?

Twelve Monkeys without Gilliam is just a murky seen-it-before time travel tale. And… Helix on Gilligan’s Island? Really? We’ve expressed our doubts about a Twelve Monkeys TV series before, based on little more than the trailer and our tendency for being burned in the past, and nothing we’ve seen/heard since has changed our minds. Though the idea of taking Terry Gilliam’s audacious and fascinating **** film and adapting it to a series is kind’a daring, and certainly a step above the less-than-challenging material of the past, Confidence Is Low that the charming eccentricity of Gilliam is present here at all, even in knock-off form. And then there’s Matrix. The virus-gone-wild premise of Season One started so strongly. We even gushed about it as the best thing on SyFy in years. But that was then, “then” meaning Episode One. By the fourth or fifth installment, it had spiraled out of control, into the all-too-familiar whirlwind of false starts, non-ending, ancient conspiracies and “wtf” moments more interesting as individual images than part of a, you know, like, story. (The frozen heads popping out of the Arctic ice sheet, for instance. Cool as hell, but … whaaaat?). SyFy’s new impulse to draw from some of the best of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, like the 12 Monkeys, the upcoming hard-sf series The Expanse, and the just-announced adaptation of Charles Robert Wilson’s Spin are admirable. But so far, their apparently irresistable urge to screw with the source material, rewrite it or dumb it down, is… troubling. We’ll see for sure Saturday night, 9 and 10 pm on SyFy. Let us know what you think int he comments below! Tweet