The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing. People pursue it like a holy grail; that magical, mercurial, fairy-dust creature that will bestow success on desperate pilgrims. We seek to ride the whirlwind, to hang onto its coattails and hope it can propel us to success. But like the internet, that vast living spiderweb of human connectedness, no one can truly tame it, control it, or predict its behavior, until after the dust settles. Then, like the wise sages we are, we scratch our wizardly-white beards and claim, we knew it all along. Like hell we did. It's like saying that we can stir the pot and know the exact molecule that will end up in our mouths. We don't. We spit in the wind and hope none of the spittle comes back to smack us in the face.

But it is fun speculating.



We all know of the vamp craze. Just ask the Twilight-teens who passionately debate the pros and cons of Team Jacob and Team Edward.

Then there are all those comic-inspired movies. Oh, excuse me, graphic novels. It appears there is a politically correct term for them nowadays, as if entire generations who grew up on its pages, need to legitimize them now as adults.

I rarely follow television anymore. That is, I don't watch them during its first broadcast. I usually catch them on the plane, on DVD, or, now that they're readily available on the internet (check out the Space Channel), at my own convenience.

So comes to the inspiration for my blog post. Not exactly the Next Big Thing, more like the New Current Thing. I've noticed that there seem to be a lot of television shows that are predicated around fairy tales and myths, such as Once Upon a Time (an excellent show a friend recently introduced me too), Grimm and Neverland--re-envisioning them for the present.

So, is this the new trend? And will it make it to the world that I am most interested in?

--Elizabeth Lang