For a director with such a vast and varied film repertoire, it’s somewhat surprising that Steven Spielberg films have rarely been adapted for television. There is a Poltergeist TV series in development at Amazon MGM, based on the film that Spielberg wrote and produced (but who really directed it is up for debate), but otherwise the pickings are slim. It’s not that Spielberg hasn’t made his mark on TV — Duel, regarded as one of his best, was made for TV, and he is connected to a wide variety of other projects that vary between Animaniacs and Band of Brothers — but the auteur typically keeps his movie and TV projects in their own silos. Typically, that is, but there is an exception, a series where Spielberg served as executive producer that took one of his films as its direct inspiration: Minority Report. And you didn’t need a precog to realize what a bad idea it was.
