Wright v. Fox

Maybe I won’t be tuning into an American remake of Spaced. I was lukewarm on it to begin with, but now that Variety is reporting that the original creators are stating their annoyance with the remake as well as their lack of input into it, I really have no interest in it. Also, if Edgar Wright’s Myspace-y Myspace blog post about this whole shindig is true and he wasn’t offered a job as a consultant for the show before the trade announcement said he would be, then the American producers aren’t exactly starting this show off on the right foot. On the trade announcement, Wright blogged:

[M]y beef with the trade announcement is more a matter of principle. I’m told after the fact that the makers of McSpaced had wanted to get us involved, but were told they couldn’t pay us to be consultants (great!).

Either way, to not even make a courtesy call prior to making that announcement just a little rude. (And let’s not even get started on the fact that Jessica’s name was all but erased from the press releases.)

So forgive me for calling out Peter Johnson and co. at Wonderland (who I’ve never met, obviously) on this one, but if you truly are the huge fans of our work that you profess to be, then would it not have been smart to get in touch before you trumpeted our potential involvement in this?

Whew. This is getting personal. What especially bothers me is that Wright is right (pun intended) about Jessica Stevenson not even getting a blurb in the trade announcement. As a co-writer and a brilliant co-star on the show, I really think she deserves equal credit. While I understand that Wright and Pegg have the bigger names since the releases of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” and while I hate to play the sexist card, methinks I smell a rat in the sexual politics of Hollywood. I’d like to see more female comedy writers get some credit. Stevenson’s work on the original “Spaced” was amazing.