This piece is a sequel to last month’s One Small Step, random musings, ramblings and reflections on TV shows that were made out of hit -- and not so hit -- movies. Hey, if it’s good enough for Iron Man..

Unlike many of you – very, very many of you, it seems -- I have been watching FlashForward. Despite its manifold flaws, I like it, even though my much-admired Janis (Christine Woods) is evil now. Maybe I even like it more ‘cause of that. As a plot development, it is annoying, yet ingenious; rather like FlashForward itself.

Another reason I like it, I must confess, is its possession of one Jack Davenport, whom I first came to love as the sardonic, arrogant and cynical Miles in the 1996-97 BBC drama This Life. The tale of a bunch of young law school graduates in London -- and, no, it’s not genre at all. What, I can only watch sci-fi? – This Life was a not-to-be-missed visit with a group of attractive-ish twenty-somethings as they dealt with careers, relationships, sexuality, depression, fidelity, love, very short skirts, many pints of beer and the somewhat sullen magnetism of Jack Davenport.

Seeing that magnetism (albeit in a diluted form) in FlashForward was something of a delightful surprise – I had not seen him out and about since his work in Channel 4’s vampire noir series Ultraviolet – and that made me check out his IMDb page to see what I might have missed in the intervening years. Which led me to a discovery: they made a This Life movie! This Life +10! A (and this’ll shock you, given the title) ten years later return to the world of Egg (Andrew Lincoln), Milly (Amita Dhiri), Warren (Jason Hughes), Anna (Daniela Nardini) and the aforementioned Miles.

Oh, joyous day!

Naturally enough, I went to Amazon (though the .co.uk version, of course – it is a BBC production, after all) and ordered it immediately -- hardly the first time I have done such a thing. Though, most often, my purchases in a similar vein have displayed a much more genre bent. (Okay, yes, I do mostly watch sci-fi. You were right to question me earlier.) A quick look back at my Amazon order history and it is clear that I have something of a problem letting go. Farscape, Dead Like Me, The Pretender, Stargate SG-1... if it’s a follow up to a show I liked, or a prequel (or even a spinoff-bridging Special Movie Event, like those great Babylon 5 outings leading to the not-so-great Crusade) and is available on DVD -- and they very often go straight-to-DVD -- then I probably own it. Yep, even the Kim Possible movies. I dig that Disney cheerleader spy chick.

I’m trying to think how far this goes back, this reluctance of mine to move on from a beloved world and the people and/or creatures that inhabit it. Y’know, I think it may have originated with a different spy series entirely: Get Smart. Oh, how I loved that show! It was one of those rare forms of entertainment on which my mother and I could agree (the others were Shirley Temple musicals and The Fall Guy), and so I could always be guaranteed a seat on the sofa when bumbling but brilliant Agent 86 and his cohorts were running amok through whatever dastardly scheme KAOS had devised that episode. I still remember when I realized that there were no new episodes of Get Smart for me to watch, that I had seen the one where 86 and 99 get married, and the one where Max is the doppelganger of the Prince, and all those ones where Hymie goes haywire at least three times, and that I had reached the extent of the CONTROL-based adventures extant in the world.

But then, oh, the late movie one glorious Friday was something called The Nude Bomb and my mother informed me that it was a Get Smart movie. A Get Smart movie! I was so happy you would have thought that I had just been given a shoe phone. I remember that evening so fondly: I got to stay up late, and we ate popcorn, and chocolate cookies, and there he was, Agent 86! And there was Larrabee! But... well, where was everyone else? I looked to my mother in supplication.

“The Chief died,” I was informed casually. “And Barbara Eden isn’t in this.”

“The Chief DIED? And Barbara Eden is Jeannie, Mother; Barbara Feldon is 99! Where is she? And where was the theme music? And why are they calling CONTROL something else? WHAT THE HELL IS PITS?”

(Okay, I think I may have just pinpointed the moment in my life when I turned into a minutia-obsessed nit-picky geek. Wow, that’s very cathartic, very... cleansing. No wonder those Scientologists are so into their past-life regression thingy. That shit works.)

Fortunately for me, a viewing of the subsequent 1989 TV movie Get Smart Again! righted a lot of the wrongs perpetrated by The Nude Bomb, bringing back the surviving cast of the series (though the original Chief really was dead), bringing back the theme music and CONTROL, and also bringing back that sense of the knowingly, slyly ridiculous that made Get Smart such a formative comedic experience in my so-called life.

Though don’t get me started on the 2008 Steve Carrell/Anne Hathaway Get Smart reprise. Oh, ye gods, the 2008 Steve Carrell/Anne Hathaway reprise. Thinking of it just makes me sad, and also mad. It’s just so bad. (Apparently, it also makes me break out into Seussian rhyme.) And it brings up a very painful topic that we may as well get out of the way as soon as possible: big screen sacrilege.

I am certainly not talking, here, about those continuing adventures, or the prequels -- hey, who doesn’t love Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me? Nor am I talking about those series- or season-bridging movies of which I spoke earlier. What I'm talking about is those TV shows that have been re-made -- or, worse, re-imagined -- into movies that manage to suck all the interest and wonder out of their source material. Those movies that make you think: “Huh. I guess [insert show here] always was pretty dumb. What was I thinking, watching it all those years?” It’s like being confronted with a dress or a suit you once wore so proudly, and in which you remember looking pretty good; then you see it again and it has wide lapels or ear-high shoulder pads or a sweetheart neckline and you realize you have been fooling yourself all these years. Nostalgia only works when we don’t accurately recall reality. (Which is why I just don’t get the Society for Creative Anachronism. I mean, the lack of hygiene alone…)

It seems like most of the major genre flops of the past couple of decades have been TV-to-movie attempts, most of them trying to bring shows of the 60’s back from the dead, from Nick at Night to Movie Night. Think Lost in Space, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, The Avengers, Wild Wild West and Land of the Lost, to name but a few. Indeed, I later learned that The Nude Bomb originally bombed at the box office back in 1980 -- astonishing that it was ever released at theaters, but certainly not that it failed dismally. Its main problem (even though it’s a continuation, not a redux) is the same one as those others, and many more besides: they somehow manage to lose the plot.

What made -- and continues to make --Get Smart great? Its humor, its intelligence, its wacky premises and refusal to take itself too seriously, along with the unwitting brilliance of Max and the depths of his connection to his ladylike and frighteningly competent partner. You never quite know how simpleton Max rose to such prominence at CONTROL, but you don’t question his right to be there.

Does any of this translate to the movie? Uh, no. Instead, they make Max an embarrassing buffoon rightfully consigned to routine desk work, 99 becomes a shrill and jaded über-bitch with some pretty obvious Daddy Issues, and CONTROL itself becomes a kind of second rate Global Justice (yes, I really love Kim Possible) . Hell, the kids from Cartoon Network’s Codename: Kids Next Door work for a better-run agency, and it's an agency is run by kids. In fact, the only thing the new Get Smart got right was in the casting of Steve Carrell, whom no one would be surprised to learn is Don Adams’s long lost son. Though coupling him with wide-eyed ingénue Anne Hathaway seems a stretch.

But the star power of Hathaway should have worked for the film, as should’ve many similar luminous appointments: Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell in Bewitched (and Ferrell again in Land of the Lost); Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in The Avengers; Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Salma Hayek and freaking Kenneth Branagh in Wild Wild West. And as for Lost in Space: William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Gary Oldman, Heather Graham, Matt LeBlanc (at the height of the Friends-ian frenzy) and Lacey Chabert (at the height of Party of Five’s slightly lesser one). Instead, the cynical casting of these Names cost the films any semblance of an appropriately reverential deference to their much more humble beginnings.

Of course, there are always a few exceptions that prove the rule (though, now that I think about it, that is a very weird saying, and makes little logical sense), and there have been a few cinematic homages that have managed to get it right. I mean, how great is The Addams Family, for instance? Even its less-successful sequel is still a funny, freaky, fannish visit with the residents of 0001 Cemetary Lane… though perhaps we won’t dwell too much on the straight-to-DVD Addams Family Reunion (the director of which gave Tim Curry far too much license--the man’s a menace when not properly reigned in), or the unnecessary 1998 TV resurrection, The New Addams Family. Other exceptions include the Mission Impossibles and the Charlie's Angelses, which didn’t completely run roughshod over their heritage and were able to maintain a semblance of both their origins and their entertainment value -- indeed, one could argue that both surpassed their predecessors -- but those successes are few and far between.