5 TV adaptations, the good and the bad

As the 'Lone Ranger' movie adaptation gets attention, here are 5 other movie adaptations of classic TV shows from the past 10 years.

2. 'Bewitched'

The series about a housewife who is secretly a witch began in 1964 and became a movie in 2005, starring Will Ferrell as Darrin and Nicole Kidman as Samantha – kind of. In the film's plot, Ferrell is an actor making a remake of the show "Bewitched" and hires Kidman to play Samantha, unaware the actress is actually a witch. The movie didn't do well at the box office, and critics gave the film negative reviews. Kristin Chenoweth, who played Maria Kelly in the film, reportedly had her part written expressly for her after Kidman saw her in "Wicked" and liked her performance.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.