Fox is making a show called Frankenstein, but it’s not about that Frankenstein

By Sam Barsanti | October 23, 2014 | 1:19am

Aux Features TV

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.

This comes from Deadline, which reports that Frankenstein—which has been given a pilot commitment—is about “a morally corrupt FBI agent” who gets brought back to life by “an antisocial Internet billionaire and his bio-engineer twin sister.” Now with healthy green skin and a charming new set of neck bolts, we assume, the agent has to choose between his “old temptations” to do bad stuff and his new-found ability to stop threats that the FBI can’t handle. That probably means he’ll be fighting against a guy named Dracula who isn’t a vampire and a guy named The Mummy who isn’t a skeleton wrapped in bandages. This latest spin on the Frankenstein story comes from Life creator Rand Ravich and Homeland executive producer Howard Gordon. Maybe someday we can stitch it to all of the other Frankenstein things and create some horrible new monster.