Promising at long last to ask the practical questions that were always lurking beneath its cheerfully blithe exterior, Bryan Fuller’s “edgier” reboot of The Munsters has officially been ordered to pilot at NBC, the network where freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. Fuller’s version is being called an “Imaginative reinvention” by people who don’t believe that’s an oxymoron—a “visually spectacular one-hour drama” that delves into the origin story behind the 1960s sitcom’s family of morbid but ultimately just sort of goofy monsters and comes up with a much darker take on how they came to live in the suburbs, terrorizing the neighbors with their puns.
For example, perhaps the new Munsters will examine how economic circumstances forced them to take in Lily’s elderly father as well as their niece—graaaaave economic circumstances. Or maybe Grampa will finally confront his drinking problem after crashing the Munster Koach and testing for an unusually high alcohol-blood content, get it? Or more likely, the Munsters will just spend more time killing people and having monster sex. Either way, discussing the heretofore-unspoken implications of a family of monsters attempting to assimilate into normal society will no longer be the sole province of adorable 1990s-era "slackers," so pretty soon they can move on to something else, like wondering how Arnold from Green Acres ever got past the Army draft board.
