MTV Turning Catfish Into a TV Series
Over the years we’ve seen plenty of movies turned into TV shows (and vice versa), but what we haven’t seen are many documentaries getting their own small screen spin-offs. MTV is looking to change that by teaming up with Relativity Media’s reality TV arm RelativityReal to create a new reality series based on the acclaimed 2010 documentary Catfish. The movie generated a lot of buzz when it played at Sundance last year and received many positive reviews, but it has since been the subject of much controversy with the filmmakers being accused of exploiting their subject and even staging parts of the film. Will the general public be receptive to a TV adaptation, and more importantly, how would such a thing even work?
It’s currently unclear if the show will actually be called Catfish, but it seems that the connection to the film will be primarily a thematic one. The movie captured a blossoming online relationship where one of the people involved was ultimately exposed for deceiving the other. The reality series would tell similar stories about “social network users who purposely misidentify themselves and the repercussions that occur.”
Since Catfish is hardly the first documentary to tell such a story on screen (for example, talhotblond was released just a year prior), it’s clear that there is plenty of material out there to be mined for a continuing series. It’s also easy to see how something like this would appeal to MTV’s audience, but the tricky thing will be finding the right tone. Will they aim to be sympathetic to their subjects, or will they go for something more sensationalist along the lines of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator? Would you watch a Catfish TV series?
