Though the show won’t be hitting the airwaves until next year, it appears that NBC is very happy with what they’re seeing from Bryan Fuller’s upcoming reboot of “The Munsters,” Mockingbird Lane, and have already ordered additional scripts with a series order still pending. Fuller, a lifelong fan of the original show, sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about his role as showrunner and the tone he’s aiming for with his ambitious approach.
“The Munsters actually do what monsters do,” he says of the show’s darker approach. “They eat people and they have to live with the ramifications of being monstrous. It’s like grounding it in a reality because the half-hour was a sitcom, we saw the monsters: they were monsters on the outside and weren’t monsters on the inside. For us, they’re monsters outside and inside, and we get to double our story.”
He also promises that each hourlong episode will explore some weighter issues than the original half-hour sitcom did.
“Everything is a metaphor for something that you can identify with in a relationship,” he continues, “The fact that Herman is in a constant state of decay and he’s married to someone who doesn’t age. We get to play with all those insecurities. The fact that he was made by his father-in-law and then has to live up to those standards; he’s always trying to find his own identity.”
The most exciting news of all, however, is that the show is planned to be jam-packed with cinematic monsters from the Universal Pictures catalogue. He specifically references appearances by The Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Phantom of the Opera.
“‘Once Upon a Time’ has fairy tales,” he says, “We have universal monsters, which for me are the fairy tales of my youth. That’s where I grew up, loving The Munsters, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Metaluna monster from ‘Silent Earth’ and the Mole People. I would love to rope in all of those characters from those stories, as well as get the Cat People and get those types of things.”
Already set to star Jerry O’Connell, Eddie Izzard and Portia de Rossi, the Mockingbird Lane pilot is directed by Bryan Singer and is likely going to air as a midseason show sometime in 2013.
