Resident Evil is dead (The Netflix show)

 I'm crying and shaking right now

Wow is me, how could this possibly happen? How could the fates be so utterly cruel as to land upon my head with their violent rage? How could the thread of promise that was a Resident Evil series wherein Albert Wesker's daughter sarcastically wills 'Zootopia porn' into the canon of the franchise come undone in some executives chamber? And why is this the first time I've ever been given hope by the machinations of corporate America? Resident Evil, the Netflix show, has been killed off. Finito. Done. It's been shot directly in the brain box; this corpse ain't reanimating, and we've set the damn thing on fire so it doesn't pop up as a bloody crimson head either. It turns out in the spate of troubling business decisions by the Internet's latest raging dumpster fire, Netflix, they were going to get something right, even despite of themselves.

Resident Evil is the latest in the recent revolving door of video game adaptations that slammed right into the ground in front of everybody, but unlike it's cousin over at Paramount, Resident Evil had the good graces to bow itself out of the running. Yes, if you lack any sort of taste whatsoever you might have gone through Halo and then Resident Evil and asked "What's the big deal?" And 'the big deal' is that these properties are repeatedly being 'treated' to low effort, low ambition TV detritus that tries it's utmost to leverage the name of the brand it is associated with to try and secure fans without the hard work of making something worthwhile to begin with. Effort is hard, just take my word for it. Why not profit from someone else's effort? (That's literally what I do everyday. Without the profiting part. Damn, I really need to learn how to start making money off of the stuff I do.)

Halo series 2 is a go already, which I guess means we'll at least get to see a Halo before that raging cinematic bonfire eats itself out, but Resident Evil didn't even really have a game plan at all. They didn't try to play all that much to the locations from the game, they intentionally set themselves in a separate continuity to those games and threw off any and all attempts to establish anything interesting expanding the world of Resident Evil, which is really what step 1 of an adaptation should be about doing, no? Instead we got a lukewarm zombie show, not even worthy of sharing the same air space as The Walking Dead, even in that show's current state, that tries to provide little name drops here and there but ultimately gives up in favour of teen angst intercut with post-apocalyptic survival scenes, with each setting given just enough screen time that you are left invested in neither. Truly the talents of experts.

And the thing is, I had hope for this show. I had hope because there is a legitimate ground for a Resident Evil style TV experience to be good; if only anyone with passion were willing to attack it. Hiring Lance Henrikson in literally any role ever is a great idea. Hiring him as an Albert Wesker with practically no similarities to the overly campy leather-donning super villain from the games beyond one eye-poppingly lame dress-up scene is less so. Getting creative with the designs of the zombies is where this franchise makes its bread and butter; but setting most of the narrative away from those zombies is deeply questionable at best. Hiring CW grade writers for the show really just underlines the sort of audience you expect to be drawn to this; and I'm not sure if it's the same audience that are into a franchise as old as 'Resident Evil'.

I get it, I really do; there's that expectation among these TV producers that the fans of video games are others from the regular TV watching society. They're social awkward shut-ins who haven't seen the light of day for years and, as I sit here looking at my own drawn curtains, there is some truth to that; but there's also truth to the fact that quality tends to transcend audience barriers. You make a product that is good, and it will spread to people who aren't typically interested in that type of content. You make something that's bad, and it might just repel the people who typically are. Netflix has been immune to good or bad show production over the years, pumping out so much content that they honestly needed to bring the axe to some of their great ongoing shows for fear of running out of advertising space on their budget sheets. But now, with tighter belts, reputation is going to have more of a sting for the Netflix boys, and a pig's sty of a show like RE ain't going to be long for the world as it might once have been.

The problem with game adaptations are two fold; the money men don't want to put in the money and effort to make it work; and the ideas they choose to adapt don't make sense in the first place. They want to do a Metal Gear Solid movie? Why, so that we get an action-packed romp full of moments where Snake fails at being sneaky? A Last of Us show? So that the game which was designed to feel like a movie can be reverted into being a long form movie? Progressing us... backwards, then? And don't get me started on the Uncharted movie; I've done a whole bloody thesis on how fundamentally hairbrained that concept even was. Every step of the way we have projects destined for a nose dive, such that the community loses their mind when a video game movie manages to be not terrible. Congratulations Sonic the movie, for that most basic of accolades.

The Resident Evil movie franchise may have also been responsible for bastardising the licence so that the director could provide an action vehicle for his wife to star in; but somehow those movies ended up feeling closer the source material than this show ever did. Maybe that's a consequence of those movies actually taking us to areas suffering from a zombie apocalypse, rather than a high school where the characters get bullied. God; there was so much potential for a show like this... Imagine if they had just jumped in at a period right adjacent to the games? We could have done vampires and werewolves and mold monsters and all that cool stuff! Instead we got mediocrity. And cancellation. Well deserved, I might add.

The producer of the show, who also worked on Supernatural, almost seemed eager to egg on this projects demise. Before the first series was even out he was doing interviews talking about how he wanted this show to go on longer than Supernatural, "Resident Evil 10 seasons, Resident Evil a Hundred seasons." He was talking doing Lady D and Las Plagas; but only as a reward for enduring ten or so seasons of tepid crap, and I'm sorry but that's not how it works. If you can't deliver something palatable for the first dish, why the hell would I stick around for the thirtieth course? The man was begging to have the show cancelled. And now it is. Another death knell in the Netflix catalogue proving that the 'quantity over quality' model really is a losers game. But hey, maybe they'll be hope for the Fallout series? >Groan<.