NBC's 'Mockingbird Lane' showing signs of life?

Oh, make up your damn mind, NBC.

At the Television Critics Association panel, NBC chief Bob Greenblatt teased that the network's reboot of "The Munsters" may not be quite as dead as previously thought. Obviously he doesn't read TV Rage, which reported on the network officially passing on the long-developed project just two weeks ago.

"I'm not saying we won't maybe try another version of The Munsters again, it's a good idea, we just have to figure out how to get it right," Greenblatt told reporters.

As to why the network passed on the Bryan Fuller/Bryan Singer effort, the executive surprisingly pointed to the creative side of things rather than the hefty $10 million price tag the pilot carried. “We just decided that it didn’t hold together well enough to yield a series,” Greenblatt said. “It looked beautiful and original and creative, but it just all ultimately didn’t come together, it just didn’t ultimately creatively all work.”

“We felt great about that cast,” Greenblatt said of the line-up, which included Jerry O'Connell as the family's Frankenstein-esque patriarch and Eddie Izzard as the vampiric Grandpa. “But we tried to make it not just a sitcom. We tried to make it an hour, which ultimately has more dramatic weight than a half-hour. It’s hard to calibrate how much weirdness vs. supernatural vs. family story. I just think we didn’t get the mix right.”

I would beg to differ. Bryan Fuller's pilot showed a deft mixture of heart, drama, and oddity, and TV Rage's own Joel Thomas agreed in his glowing review of the Halloween special. Given that the original pilot was in development for some two years, perhaps we shouldn't put the nail in the coffin of this reboot just yet.