ABC scraps Dracula show The Brides—Too “pricy” to make amid pandemic

A while back, ABC announced that it was making a pilot for a new supernatural soap opera called The Brides, all about the brides of Dracula, who in this show have left their husband and have careers in New York City. Weird premise? Yes. But it starred genre mainstay Gina Torres in the lead of ex-Dracula Cleo, and had a bunch of people from Riverdale and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina working behind the scenes. It could have gone somewhere.

But it won’t, because Variety reports that ABC has scrapped plans to make the pilot, which would have been on “the pricer side to produce.” ABC also passed on the Thirtysomething sequel Thirtysomething(else) (we see what you did with the title there). Both of these shows were considered frontrunners to go to series before the pandemic.

And it’s that last part that’s the most interesting. We know that Hollywood pretty much shut down after the coronavirus pandemic really got rolling in March, it being pretty much impossible to protect film and TV workers on crowded sets. So far as TV goes, that hasn’t really affected people yet, because everything airing now was filmed a while ago, before we entered our brave new socially distant world.

But that’s going to change. Very little is being filmed right now, and as we can see, some things that were going to be filmed are being abandoned on account of price and difficulty. We could be headed, sooner or later, for a TV dead zone, with nothing new coming out.

True, some productions, like James Cameron’s Avatar 2 and Netflix’s The Witcher, are slowly getting back to work, but many smaller ones won’t be able to afford to implement the stringent safety measures necessarily to make sure that cast and crew are protected from the coronavirus, at least until a vaccine is widely available. We’ll get a couple of new things, but likely not enough to make up for The Dead Zone.

And it’s hard to tell exactly how long this filming moratorium will last. Coronavirus cases are spiking in several states, and AMC just announced that it’s moving back its planned reopening date from July 15 to July 30. After all, what’s the point of opening when Hollywood keeps pushing back the release dates of movie theaters? And this could happen again.

So what’s the solution? Well, panic is always an option. More likely, we’ll just have to hunker down and make our own fun for a while, all which doing what we can to help this pandemic pass as quickly as possible, which means wearing face masks, quarantining when possible, and the like.

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