A classic blunder, executives see how wildly successful the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was, and they immediately work up plans for a TV series, hoping to capitalize on the film's success. But what happens instead is taking something that turned out great, and mercilessly beating it to death, trying to squeeze every last penny out of it.
The movie was great, but the sit-com sucks. The movie was full of funny characters, and the humor was very spontaneous. The characters didn't have to try to be funny, because they were just funny anyway. They seemed very genuine in the film, but in the pilot episode of the series, everything seemed so forced. The jokes and one-liners were poorly written and poorly delivered.
Furthermore, the chemistry between Ian and Toula in the film was very convincing; Ian was very charming and Toula was very loving. I thought that both Nia Vardalos and John Corbett did a great job. In the show, however, the replacement Ian (called "Thomas" in the show) was a total putz, I didn't like him at all, and he had almost no chemistry with Toula (or "Nia", rather). In the film, Ian was very accepting and even enthusiastic to espouse the Portokalos family traditions. But in the show, he bitches to Nia about "boundaries" and bickers with Gus about who built Stonehenge.
The only character that was almost tolerable on the show was Gus, the dad. They overdid his dialogue a bit, but he's still funny to watch.
"My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a great movie, it was relatively inexpensive to produce and made lots of money, and people loved it. And I'm sure many DVDs and VHS tapes will be sold. I already have the DVD. "My Big Fat Greek Life", on the other hand, is just a bad idea; the movie was a great movie and let's just leave it at that, don't corrupt its legacy with a cornball sit-com.
