The Field Of Dreams series that never was left a stadium sitting in an Iowa cornfield
Michael Schur says that the cancellation of his Peacock Field Of Dreams reboot deep into pre-production had some left behind some tangible unfinished business
Aux News Field of Dreams
Regardless of how many series Max-neé-HBO scrubs from its service, the bursting of the streaming bubble has already left some tangible wreckage in its wake. And what makes better evidence of the entire model’s eyes-too-big-for-pockets ethos than a full baseball stadium intended to house a prestige limited series, abandoned and empty in a midwest state?
In a new report from Vulture (which really warrants a full read) on streaming’s profound reformulation of the television industry, The Good Place creator Michael Schur discusses Peacock’s late-game cancelation of his planned Field Of Dreams reboot, which he recalls happening pretty swiftly.
“They just changed their mind,” Schur says. “They didn’t want to spend the money anymore.” As Schur explains, the whiplash of that decision had more than a few lasting consequences: “We built a baseball stadium in a cornfield in Iowa that’s still sitting there as we speak.”
Schur’s limited series, based on the 1989 baseball classic starring Kevin Costner, was abruptly canceled last year after receiving a straight-to-series order in August 2021. When the series was shut down, it was reportedly deep into a pre-production that didn’t exactly come cheap: the reboot relocated after Major League Baseball had already recreated a field on location.
The Field Of Dreams reboot is far from the only series to fall victim to budget cuts and layoffs across the industry, an ugly cycle that became characterized by the cancellation—or outright removal—of countless series. Vulture’s report also highlights Nasim Pedrad’s Chad, which was canceled hours before its season 2 premiere, and J.J. Abrams’ Demimonde, which was axed after four years of development and cost around $200 million.
“The Demimonde thing shook everybody up,” an unnamed showrunner shared with Vulture. “If HBO can say ‘no’ to J. J. Abrams, they could say ‘no’ to anybody.” (Except for, apparently, Sam Levinson.)
41 Comments
I hope least some people who have a baseball diamond fetish got off on this. “if you build it they will come” as the line goes.
NBC/Peacock were probably put off by a league of their own not being a hit for Amazon.
That show is getting a second season, however a shortened one.
DiscoveryWarner has been doing a lot of this shit recently. They canceled Snow Piercer before it aired its completed fourth and final season and they pulled a season of Miracle Workers a day or so before it was set to premiere in early January. I’m worried that they’re going to do with Miracle Workers what they did to Chad.
Yeah, what possible reason is there to not show something that’s already in the can, unless it’s really, really, awful.Is it a tax thing like Batgirl? Cause if it is, they need to change the way they define write offs. I mean, other taxpayers gotta pay more for the privilege of NOT seeing the last season of Snowpiercer?
Maybe they have the same understanding of write-offs as David in Schitt’s Creek.
Unless they think it’s going to add a lot of subscribers, it’s financially better to take the tax benefit of writing off the cost of production. It’s a mercenary perspective, but I’m sure they ran the math.
Yeah, but they run the math for like three months at a time. Everything about how Zaslav* runs the company is the absolute shortest term thinking possible.
*He’s just the worst offender. It’s rampant throughout modern capitalism, where companies don’t attempt to build a brand or create loyalty and goodwill any more so they have long-term value, they just extract as much in the shortest term possible.
No argument here. Not building that content library is long-term self defeating.Thing is, except for flagship shows that actually do drive subscriber adds, they could do this with almost anything. A Disney Plus subscription costs around $100 a year. Writing off a $70 million production equals a $14 million tax break (20% of the “loss”). Unless they think that show is going to draw in 140,000 new subscribers then financially they’re better off with the writeoff.
I fear the same fate will befall the back half of season four of Doom Patrol since the last episode of the first half aired in early January 2023 and no air date for the last five episodes has even been hinted at as yet
And yet they aired the last episodes of Titans, a decidedly worse series.
Miracle Workers is actually premiering next month, on July 10. The new date was announced last week.
That’s good. We’ll see if they actually air it or push it back again.
Miracle Workers: End Game starts 7/10!
The company is called Warner Bros. Discovery, not DiscoveryWarner. Not sure where you got that title from.
Was this supposed to be based on the novel Shoeless Joe or the movie adaptation? The former is a pretty tedious read unless you’re as enamored with baseball as the author, the latter wisely ditches all the “baseball as religion” crap and makes it mostly a story about Ray Kinsella connecting with his dad. They could possibly stretch the book out into a limited-run series (that would likely be awful), but I can’t see how they could drag out the more limited scope of the film.
I have every confidence that they could find writers who could drag that film out into at least 2 season worth of episodes. It would have been awful, sure, but it would have been doable.
The movie itself feels like it barely fills its runtime, so I have to think it would need to expand the scope.
Given how Schur tends to operate, I’m guessing either source material is a very very loose jumping-off point and the tv show would have had Negro League players and AAGPBL players and been about a diverse cast learning from each other and trying to do good.
I seriously feel that would have been a good series. Bringing in players from the Homestead Greys, etc. would have been a serious bonus.
I raised my eyebrows at that mention in the Vulture article as well. Good riddance – why does that need to be revisited? I genuinely don’t think I want Schur’s take on it in a “limited series”.
More people should have said no to JJ Abrams. Not because he’s awful (I love some of the things he’s been a part of) but because he was part of this protracted development nightmare that ate up enough money for multiple full series to be built and shot. If these studios made bolder, but financially survivable bets, there wouldn’t have had to be so much panic-canceling going on. OK, Chad must have been pretty cheap to make, but many of these other shows were pricey, especially ones in epic development phases that never seemed to end. I just wish they would embrace smaller, weirder, cheaper — everyone would win.
JJ Abrams, the destroyer of worlds.In this case somehow both Star Wars *and* Star Trek which is quite a (non) achievement.
Why did they build an entirely new baseball field in a cornfield in Iowa, when the field from the original movie is still there?? I mean MLB uses it once a year or so, but outside of that it’s a very lowkey roadside attraction tourist stop
Yeah, unless they built another one, there seems to be some confusion about why that stadium’s there.And anytime anything strange happens in a cornfield, you have to wonder if it has something to do with the wrath of He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
Brilliant! That cross-over practically writes itself.
If you build it, He will come.
“He wants you too, Michael.”
MLB uses the new stadium, not the one built for the movie. The original one doesn’t comply with MLB standards. Per Wikipedia:The field constructed for the movie, which has been operated as a tourist destination since 1989, could not be brought to MLB game standards without permanently altering major features of the property and destroying its movie authenticity, so it was decided to build a separate playing facility at a distance of approximately 500 ft (150 m) in the cornfields.
Hm, did not realize it but that makes sense… but that also raises the question why they didn’t use the original one (though I would imagine there may be rights/ownership issues with the actual field since it its own business)
If you’re doing a television show, you need a set you can use day after day, modify as needed, destroy, etc. That’s not going to work for a tourist attraction. Also, obviously you’d like not to waste things, but building a baseball field is not exactly a huge undertaking. You’re not talking about a real stadium, I imagine, with bleachers for thousands. You just carve the shape of the field in a cornfield and put in bases and stuff.
Hot take: Field of Dreams sucked and this show likely would have sucked, too.
Tepid take: Field of Dreams is a decent sports movie, and your take “sucks”. Please find a better expressive.
I found it to be a well executed movie based on a lame story foundation. I also contend that it is barely a “baseball” movie, as there is only about 30 seconds of actual baseball being played on screen, most of which is just guys playing catch. You could have made the same story about the ghosts of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper appearing in an amphitheater some delusional son built in a Iowa cornfield for his jerk-wad father who loved old time rock.There’s just not enough legs to that story to turn it into a series.
I would argue that Baseball isn’t the point of the movie
I think it’s a good movie but there was absolutely no need to remake it
I didn’t even know this was a thing, but if Michael Shur was involved I would have watched the hell out of it.
Same. I don’t care that much about the subject matter, but Michael Schur has had such a great track record that I’d check it out for his name alone.
Yes, there is a scene from The Critic about Field of Dreams.
Their first mistake was thinking we needed another Field of Dreams. The movie is perfect. It works. We don’t need to retell that story in ten seasons.
Modern entertainment isn’t about what we need, silly!