Posted in: Amazon Studios, MGM Television, TV | Tagged: ian fleming, james bond

James Bond 007 Series License to Kill the Franchise? Not Necessarily

Amazon MGM Studios has everything it needs to make a prestigious and acclaimed James Bond 007 TV series right in front of them - here's how.

James Bond 007 is in crisis – nobody knows what to do with the character or the movies next. Now that MGM Studios and Amazon have gained full creative control of the franchise, fans are, of course, a-tizzy about what they might do with it. Will they ruin it with multiple streaming spinoffs that suck? That's likely given the track record of big companies taking over major franchises and running them to the ground – just look at Marvel movies and Star Wars. There is a way for Amazon to make a great James Bond 007 TV series for the Prime streaming service, but the studio almost certainly won't do it.

The Answer? Adapt the Ian Fleming Novels Properly

It was Quentin Tarantino who first brought up the idea when he wanted to adapt Casino Royale in its original post-war setting of old-school high living and male angst. Most James Bond 007 fans worldwide only know the movies, not the books. The movies are glammed-up versions of the books featuring Bond as a debonair secret agent who goes to a vacation spot to eat, drink, smoke, kill some bad guys, and have sex with hot babes without consequence. Ian Fleming's books feature a darker character. James Bond in the books is a rage-filled paranoid burnout with PTSD who's terrified of his luck running out one day and getting killed by someone deadlier than him, who tries to drown out his fears with food, alcohol, and sex, who's a racist and misogynist with a Madonna-Whore complex who wants to rescue women, yet takes out his fear of women by raping them during consensual encounters. Bond actually has the tragic backstory of an HBO character: his parents died when he was a boy, he went to an exclusive boy's school where he was groomed into a sexual encounter with the female school nurse there before he went to war and ended up in Naval Intelligence.

A good James Bond 007 TV series could adapt the books faithfully, set in the Fifties but with the context of the British Empire crumbling and losing power in the background. M sends Bond on missions as the British government tries to assert its dwindling power. There's no need to change the plots at all, just add that political layer and presto! It all fits. The sociopolitical parallels with the present are right there without any need to alter the books since the UK is currently in crisis post-Brexit and facing the loss of its political and economic power on the world stage.

Imagine a Prestige James Bond 007 TV Series

The original James Bond 007 books were already Fleming's social commentary on his times, whether he intended it or not, and many fans seem to miss or ignore that layer. The Bond villains were inspired by Ian Fleming meeting real tycoons and multimillionaires at clubs and parties and the golf course, so he was really writing those people into the books. They really were the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of their time. Take the original book version of Moonraker, which takes place entirely in 1955 London, where Bond teams up with an undercover policewoman to discover that Hugo Drax, the tycoon who's spearheading Britain's space rocket program, is a secret Nazi with a plan to get revenge on the West. Gosh! That sounds so far-fetched! Drax was inspired by real-life Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun who was charged by Hitler to develop a superweapon to terrorise London during World War II before he defected to the Allies to help the Americas develop their space rockets. Like Bond, Fleming was part of Naval Intelligence during the War and brought many of his experiences and anecdotes to his books.

Why Amazon and MGM Studios Probably Won't Do it

Amazon and MGM have a golden opportunity to make an MA-rated prestige TV series out of the Bond novels. They could easily take the same route that made Bosch and Reacher such a success on Prime by adapting one book per season and calling it Bond. They already have Fleming's original thirteen novels and four short stories to adapt without hiring writers to come up with terrible "new takes." Chances are they probably won't do that because a new James Bond 007 movie is considered the studio's jewel in the crown, and an actual James Bond TV series threatens to dilute the brand since audiences would start thinking they wouldn't need to bother going to the movies if they can just stay home and watch a better-streaming TV series. You can only do this as a prestigious big-budget cable or streaming TV series, and it would be the first time viewers would see the real James Bond. The original stories are social documents of post-war Britain with parallels to the present day.

Alas, nobody knows what to do with Bond now, not MGM, not Amazon execs, not the Broccolis, not even the Bond Estate. The latest "official" novels are about a team of young, new 00 agents in the present day on missions trying to trace an MIA Bond. That says everything about the state of the franchise.

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