Wait, ‘Speed’ Was Almost A TV Series???

Pop quiz, hotshot. You want to adapt your immensely popular action film into a television series. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO? That’s the question Decider posed to Speed screenwriter Graham Yost when we met with the renowned scribe to talk about the upcoming season of his critically-acclaimed Amazon drama Sneaky Pete. Okay, that’s not exactly how we phrased our question. We didn’t yell at him or call him a hotshot, but we did ask Yost if he’d ever been approached about turning his famous 1994 action-thriller into a TV series.

If shows like Charmed, Fear Factor, and Roswell deserve the reboot treatment, surely Speed, a modern classic, could be adapted for television, right? It’s something the Sneaky Pete showrunner has looked into.

“You know [Speed producer] Mark Gordon and I looked at that about 15 years ago, and worked with a couple writers and had an idea,” Yost told Decider. “It was sort of a SWAT show. It would have to be a network episodic thing, which would get very tiresome after a while because you’d be doing the suspense thing, new suspense every week.”

One of the trickier aspects of turning the self-contained drama of Speed into a series would be breaking the story into entertaining, action-packed installments that organically accelerate the story. Yost, who’s the creative force behind serialized dramas like Justified and the aforementioned Sneaky Pete, noted how difficult it would be to maintain that type of suspense on a week-to-week basis.

“Speed was essentially a disaster movie that looked like an action movie,” Yost continued. “Instead of a boat turned upside down like Poseidon Adventure, you got a bus that can’t stop. It’s the same kind of thing. It’s a lot of people caught. But it’s really hard to serialize that kind of suspense.”

A TV series about a bomb on a bus that explodes if it drops below 50 mph seems like it’d feature too many moving parts to tell a realistic, compelling story. Then again, you could say the same about agent Jack Bauer’s efforts to save the world from a variety of dastardly terrorist plots. Perhaps the closest analog to a Speed TV show is the recently-revived Fox series 24.

“24 was very smart. It was this week break into the bank; this week grab this guy; this week… dead,” Yost said. “It would be tough, but it’s something we’ve thought about. It’s just hard to crack.”

The second season of Sneaky Pete premieres Friday, March 9 on Prime Video.

Stream Sneaky Pete on Prime Video