Fox is making a show called Frankenstein, but it’s not about that Frankenstein
There’s something about the idea of a mad scientist digging up a bunch of corpses, stitching them together to create a monster, and then bringing that monster back to life that really resonates with production companies. Maybe it’s because their constant digging up of old ideas and cramming them together to make new ideas causes them to identify with the mad scientist, or maybe it’s just because Frankenstein is a recognizable property and it’s easier to rip that off than come up with something different. Either way, Fox has decided to break out of the cliché by rejecting the boring path that every other studio is taking—including, oddly enough, Fox itself—by not adapting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and putting some dumb twist on it. No, Fox is better than that. It’s simply making a show called Frankenstein that doesn’t really have anything to do with the Frankenstein that all of those other things are about.