10 Movies That Would Make Better TV Shows

A bit of a no-brainer, this: after all, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’ Sin City, adapted from Miller’s own extraordinarily hyperreal noir tour de force, was composed of several smaller stories vaguely linked together by location and tone.

Sin City comprises three significant ‘yarns’ from Miller’s Basin City: the first, eponymous story featuring granite hardman Marv’s attempts to avenge the death of his friend (renamed The Hard Goodbye in later printings); The Big Fat Kill, detailing Sin City maverick P.I. Dwight McCarthy; and That Yellow Bastard, a tale of sacrifice and hard knocks starring doomed cop John Hartigan. All three yarns were bookended by both parts of The Customer Is Always Right, a short story taken from the Booze, Broads & Bullets anthology.

That’s the format of pretty much all of Miller’s Sin City yarns: novella length stories featuring many of the same characters in the same grim noir setting intersecting and dovetailing together. If that’s not perfectly framed for a television series, I don’t know what is.

While the Sin City movie (and to a lesser extent, the inferior sequel A Dame To Kill For) were fascinating exercises in translating the comic books to the big screen, there’s nothing in the resulting movies that couldn’t equally well have been conveyed to the small screen.

In fact the films - each longer than they probably needed to be - actually suffer by requiring so much of Miller’s trademark over-the-top hardboiled machismo to be experienced on screen in one sitting.

Adapting the series for television would have solved that problem without losing anything in terms of pacing or storytelling, and allowed for the possibility of new Sin City yarns to be debuted on the show, perhaps even by guest writers.