Why Quentin Tarantino turned against his favourite TV shows: “I never watched it again”
One of the side effects of so many of Hollywood’s marquee movie franchises existing for so long is that the directors who helm the latest entries have grown up as fans. It’s not something Quentin Tarantino will ever have to contend with, but he did find himself in a similar position once.
So many modern sequels have traded so heavily on nostalgia and the cinematic equivalent of key-jangling that it might be wiser for the studios to hire people who never watched the original. JJ Abrams’ Star Wars, Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters, David Gordon Green’s Halloween, and James Mangold’s fifth Indiana Jones were all made by filmmakers who were fans first, and they were all largely mediocre.
What does this have to do with Tarantino, one of the few elite-level auteurs who’ll never take the reins on a major blockbuster property originated by someone else? Well, he made the cardinal sin of taking his fandom of certain TV shows to the next level and ended up regretting it when he couldn’t bring himself to watch them again.
Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom was the only series he watched three times, but he didn’t direct an episode. However, he did board ER and CSI for one-episode guest spots behind the camera and played a recurring role on Jennifer Garner’s Alias, something that soured him on sitting down in front of the TV to catch up on the latest weekly adventures of the cast.
“I’ve directed an episode of ER; I’ve directed an episode of CSI, and I acted in a couple of episodes of Alias. I did them all because I was a big fan of the show,” he confessed to Metro. “However, the weird byproduct of it is after I got through doing the show, I never watched it again. I guess I’ve invested so much I shut it off. If I like a show now, I just want to keep liking it.”
Tarantino almost directed an episode of The X-Files before red tape got in the way, so it stands to reason that he was free to continue enjoying Mulder and Scully’s extraterrestrial escapades. The two-time Academy Award winner is also a noted supporter of Elmore Leonard and Justified, the series based on his story ‘Fire in the Hole’, and he might have been turned against that one, too, had he followed through on his plans to oversee at least one episode of the sequel series City Primeval.
He even called the sitcom How I Met Your Mother his all-time favourite, not that there was ever a chance he could be lured to that format, even for a one-off. Still, it’s advice worth heeding for directors who double as fans: stay away from your favourite show, or you’ll never want to watch it again.
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