Without wanting to spoil anything for those who haven't seen the film, From Dusk Till Dawn wouldn't be many people's first choice of a TV series. There's talking, and talking, and talking, and talking, and then there's screaming and blood and all sorts of unpleasant weirdness, and then it ends.

Admittedly that didn't stop two shoestring sequels from being made – which we'll ignore on the basis that nobody has ever seen them – but a television series? With overlapping story arcs and characters who don't exist just to kick vampires in the head? Stranger premises have yielded results, but can a From Dusk Till Dawn series really pull this transformation off?

On the basis of the first episode, which appeared on Netflix yesterday and aired on the El Rey network in the US, it's iffy. Directed by Robert Rodriguez himself, it's more or less an elongated version of the film's first eight minutes. The Gecko brothers – here played by Not George Clooney and Not Quentin Tarantino – have robbed a bank and are heading to Mexico, but first they need to stop off at a liquor store. They meet a Texas ranger and, if you've seen the film, you'll have a pretty good idea of what happens next. Unless you can't remember what happened in the first half of the film because you only watched it for the sexy vampire battle at the end.

And this seems to be the biggest problem with the series. If it's really going to be a much longer remake of the movie, we're about five hours away from seeing anything interesting. And then, when we get there, it'll be such a directionless, drawn-out spectacle of flashes and bangs that you may as well watch all the Transformers films back to back instead.

There are hints, however subtle, that the series aspires to be bigger than the film. This is largely signalled via the use of flashbacks. Perhaps by the end of the series, the flashbacks will help deepen the characters and contextualise their motives. Or perhaps they'll just be pointless padding exercises that we'll have to endure. Also, unlike the film, the series has set up a cat-and-mouse game between the Geckos and a ranger. At least this means that the hours before Not Clooney and Not Tarantino reach the Titty Twister might actually have some purpose.

Don Johnson as Sheriff Earl McGraw in From Dusk Till Dawn. Photograph: Robert Rodriguez

The performances, too, sit on a spectrum of acceptability. There's a very good chance that DJ Cotrona only got the part because a casting agent took a polaroid of George Clooney into the audition room and picked the closest match, but Zane Holtz is already a much more interesting prospect. That might be because Richie Gecko is shaping up to be the show's fulcrum, or perhaps it's just because everyone is a better actor than Quentin Tarantino. Then there's Don Johnson's turn as a cop, which is easily the best aspect of the whole thing so far. However, he's a cop who keeps counting down to his retirement, so perhaps we shouldn't get too attached just yet.

There's a worry that US drama is aping Hollywood by slipping into a morass of remakes and spin-offs. After all, the big shows of this year look set to be an Avengers spin-off, a Silence of the Lambs spin-off, a Batman spin-off, a Sleepy Hollow adaptation, a Fargo adaptation, a Breaking Bad spin-off, a Walking Dead spin-off and enough variations of NCIS to give you a nosebleed. Even House of Cards and Game of Thrones are based on existing works. Originality, it seems, is on the out. And, as fun as it may eventually turn out to be, From Dusk till Dawn doesn't offer much encouragement that things will change.

It's worth keeping an eye on – or at least worth waiting for a few weeks so you can watch the whole lot in one go and let the dull moments wash over you – but so far, it's not very convincing. On the basis of the opener, From Dusk till Dawn might just be the most unnecessary film-to-TV adaptation since they took Angelica Huston's Agnes Brown and turned it into Mrs Brown's Boys.