Goodfellas could become a TV show: You gonna let them get away with that? What's the world coming to?

Deadline reports that Warner Bros. is considering developing a TV series adaptation of Goodfellas, the Martin Scorsese-directed film about Mafia wiseguys that was pretty good, but not, you know, Tom Cruise-and-Madonna good. The film is celebrating (and we do mean celebrating; check out this awesomely huge cast-and-crew retrospective orchestrated by GQ) its 20th anniversary this week, and suddenly it seems like everyone wants to do the right thing and give Paulie (and everyone else) his tribute.

Promisingly, original Wiseguy author Nicholas Pileggi is rumored to be the Jimmy Two Times who will adapt his own screenplay, even though the premise for turning an already-perfect film into a serialized TV show is sliced so thin, it’d liquefy in the pan with a little oil. It’s not such a good system. And that’s particularly true seeing as having a gangster project these days is like a license to steal, a license to do anything, with made men popping up in everything from Boardwalk Empire to John Gotti Jr.’s proposed biopic about his dad, “The Teflon Don,” to Scorsese maybe getting Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci back together for what may as well be called Goodfellas Part III. (Not that we’d complain.) So why Pileggi would want to take his masterpiece and turn it into an average nobody, a series that would live the rest of its life like a schnook, we don’t know. But hey, we’re just breaking balls here, and so on. This is fun. If only every story could consist almost entirely of Goodfellas quotes.