For reasons as yet maddeningly unclear, you have been made Deputy Director for Content at that Amazon Prime streaming thing. Perhaps everyone else on Earth is dead, or like me you are just an AI interface spewing words onto screens.
Anyway, wha’evah, you are tasked with commissioning spin-off Bond series, because as Star Wars has demonstrated, that is so magically successful. An eight-part season must be launched, based on existing Bond film IP.
Your limit is that the lead character must be either the villain, their series leading up to the events of the existing Bond film, or the surviving female lead, her eight episodes taking her beyond the end of the film and also beyond the point where Bond says goodbye / dumps her in a hedge.
So, for villain it’s always prequel/prologue; for surviving woman, sequel/epilogue.
First up - Dr No. Which do you commission? Which do you want to see? Decision can be influenced by any existing background from book or film, or you can choose to wholly ignore that and totally retcon.
Dr No - series working title “No Hands”
Honey Ryder - series working title “She sells seashells on the sea shore”
No’s backstory from the novel is extremely interesting in itself. Seeing him effectively infiltrate the Tong crime syndicate to the point where they trust him with their money offers a vast field for scheming and cabal, artfully manoeuvring rivals into the abyss, violently disposing competition from Tong and Yakuza families against the backdrop of the wars and violence of a torn and tortured Asian theatre and the 20s Tong wars in the US.
Huge potential for drama and tragedy on an epic scale - either in a limited series or with potential for a second season. If so, No’s downfall would be the season finale, a single episode dedicated to his interrogation and torture by his former accomplices. His wish to end it fighting with his will to keep the stolen money in exchange for his hands. The bullet to the chest ending the episode and the season.
The next one starts with the war against his injuries and the war in the world. No scheming his escape and island retreat, always in danger of being found out by his former masters. Making a fortune on guano; looking out to make another with his Russian partners in the toppling business. Getting annoyed by roseate spoonbills and the Audubon society.
If this was actually made by Amazon I’d be watching it.
While I would be full of joy seeing any prequel/sequel series tank resoundingly and Honey would be perfect for that, Dustin laid out the perfect pitch which I actually would also watch.
Still, prequels/sequels with side characters… Jim, you really have succeeded in making me suffer.
My pitch is simple, Pamela Anderson as Honey, 30 years after the events of Dr No.
She trains a rag tag bunch of Bonds fellow dumpees and they become successful life guards in LA and also Bounty Hunters on the side
Which do you inflict on the World? Eight rapidly forgotten episodes that will be alleged to do much murder to people’s childhoods, although anyone who does say such a thing should indeed have been murdered as a child, and there’s still considerable exculpatory justification for it as an “adult”.
Today - Tomorrow Never Dies.
Up to but not including the film for the villain, after the film for the female lead. What made Carver the way he was, or what future lies ahead for Wai Lin once she extracts herself from a moistened Bond?
Commission away!
Carver - series working title - “Yesterday’s News”
Wai Lin - series working title - “The (non-existent little red) Book of Wai Lin”
Mai Lin would be successful - so I‘m voting for Carver‘s early years and hope it will feature his kung fu love/hate relationship, explaining it as his main goal in life until a female kung fu master won against him during a competition he attended under his chosen fight name: The Carver. Yes, and it HAS to be similarly funny.
The mission is - commission. Today, the IP to desecrate is The Living Daylights.
Will it be eight episodes exploring, for those who could possibly care, how Koskov and Whitaker came to connive together, possibly through shady paramilitary and mercenary operations and a mutual love of roleplay with action figures (a.k.a. playing with dollies)?
Or will you push out there eight episodes dramatising Kara’s post-film niche interest of “orchestra - with convoluted espionage!”?
Up to you. You poor fool.
Koskov & Whitaker - series working title - “Toy Soldiers”
Kara - series working title - “Tinker, Tailor. Soldier, Kazoo”
As is possible within the whimsical rules of the game, I have wholly retconned The Living Daylights and it’s a much more enjoyable film if one removes the cello and gives her a kazoo. “Your kazoo - it’s a Stradivarius?”; “I must get my kazoo! / No. Way.”, " A kazoo with a name?” Etc.
Kara a psychodrama tied into the Carver universe
Carver like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo is obsessed with the image of a dead woman playing cello.
Kara dumped by oo7 and performing around venues in 80s UK, meets Carver who married her and then !!!?!! Transforms her into the dead woman’s image. Even changing her name to
Why choose between two horrible options when you can do both, with huge crossover appeal: Kara and her relationship with Koskov, before it was horribly ruined by that gaslighting sexist from London? Both series can have these characters appear! It‘s the expanded universe of IP characters! And they don’t even need Bond anymore!
True, Koskov & Kara (and a kazoo) could appear in each other’s series. I expect we will need a flowchart to explain the timelines of this one. I suspect it’s the midnight kazoo practice that resolved Koskov on having Kara murdered.
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